My research is about how young children learn two systemic aspects of the pronunciation of their first language: the qualities of its speech sounds and its timing patterns.

 

Almost everyone believes that children learn these by imitation. Not by imitation in the sense of simple mimicry, of course, but by identifying and then copying the important characteristics of what they hear.

 

This belief is widespread for several reasons:

  • because it appears to be ‘common sense’ (the information is there in the signal and replication occurs, so why not by copying?);
  • because children certainly do learn to pronounce words by imitation (but learning the sequence of speech sounds that make up individual words is not the same as learning the systemic aspects of pronunciation - including the acoustic qualities needed to reproduce those speech sounds - which condition the production of all words);
  • and because there has been no obvious alternative mechanism (or mechanisms) to explain how children do end up sounding - more or less - like the people around them.

However, this is no more than a belief. There is no evidence for  ‘imitative’ accounts of either the learning of speech sounds or the learning of the temporal phonetic phenomena that characterise particular languages.

 

In my thesis I lay out the problems with the conventional view. I then describe alternative mechanisms, showing firstly how the reflection (reformulation) of a child’s utterances by his mother leads to the emergence of speech sounds, and secondly how the aerodynamics and respiratory physiology of speech in a child-size body lead to behaviour that we have wrongly construed to be timing-based. In neither case is the child's production modelled on what he hears.

 

In comparison to what is currently believed, my proposals are both more plausible and more coherent. They also resolve some longstanding problems in speech and speech development, and will lead to better results in teaching pronunciation to older learners.

 

Please contact me if you have any questions or comments.