Spoken word production in early language development

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A wonderful milestone in children's development is the day they produce their first word. This usually occurs around children's first birthday. The emergence of spoken word production is even more amazing when we consider the fact that young children are not born with the ability to talk. Within the first 12 months of their lives, they go from having primarily comprehension-based knowledge and transition to a remarkable point in development when they begin to speak. In this short period of time, they have begun to unify their language comprehension and production abilities. This research tackles a fundamental and basic issue of language development: the cognitive processes of spoken word production in children. Central challenges to the learner are to develop mental representations of language, organize these representations, and integrate new representations into existing ones. Empirical studies of developmental speech production can help us understand how learners accomplish these fundamental tasks. This research will use on-line methods, measuring the time it takes to produce a word and tracking children's eye movements to images as they produce a word. The questions addressed in this research have implications for how we conceive of early language development. These findings will be of interest not only to researchers in cognitive and language sciences, but also to health practitioners interested in tools for clinical assessment and therapy.