Dan Swingley, University of Pennsylvania, gave the department colloquium last Friday, October 19. The title and abstract of his talk follows.
Phonetic learning and phonological interpretation
What do infants learn when they begin to discover their language? Cognitive psychologists considering phonological development generally favor perceptual-learning, "bottom up" accounts of phonetic category learning, and tend to identify such categories with phonological categories. Clinicians generally view the lexicon as more important and hold that much of the developmental action takes place after the first year. I will argue for a hybrid in which the lexicon is important, but right from the beginning. Young infants learn words and sounds at the same time--but take a long time to figure out how phonological categories should be interpreted. I will discuss possible solutions to the problem of phonetic category discovery, and experiments on phonetic interpretation in word learning and word recognition.
