1. Phonetics and Phonology

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about how children learn to recognise the basic sounds that make up their mother tongue, focusing in particular on: (i) the extent to which any given language will make use of the complete set of phonemes available; (ii) the extent to which different languages distinguish phonemes in different ways; (iii) the traditional view of child language acquisition, articulated by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s; (iv) the three ‘ingredients’ of a consonant sound – the manner of articulation, the place of articulation, and the phonation – and children’s ability to distinguish phonemes where just one ingredient is different, e.g. /d/ and /t/; and (v) criticisms of the traditional view of child language acquisition; and (vi) the development of new theories of child language acquisition.

Course

In this course, Professor Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool) explores childhood language acquisition. In the first lecture, we explore how children learn to distinguish the basic sounds (phonemes) that make up their mother tongue. In the second lecture, we think about how children learn new words. In the third lecture, we explore how children learn the rules of morphology and how we can test for that understanding. Next, we think about how children learn the rules of syntax. In the fifth and final lecture, we review a general timeline of child language acquisition from the middle of the second trimester to five years old.

Lecturer

Professor Ben Ambridge is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on children's first language acquisition, mostly using judgment and production methodologies. He is particularly interested in children's errors involving question formation (e.g., *What he doesn't like?) and verb argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *The joked giggled him; *I falled over). One of Professor Ambridge’s recent publications is ‘Syntactic representations contain semantic information: Evidence from Balinese passives’ (2022), and he is also the author of the popular science book Psy-Q, Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee? (2014).