Bilingual children's use of statistical and usage-based learning to build rich cognitive representations of speech sounds

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Learning to speak is a complex task that requires rich cognitive representations of speech sounds, rapid activation of these representations, and practiced motor schemas. Through daily practice, children learn the speech sounds of their language and produce few errors by the age of 5 years; in contrast, adults learning a second language often maintain accented speech despite years of experience with the language. When we say that someone speaks with an "accent", we typically are referring to the differences in the phonetics and phonology of this speaker. Phonetics describes the acoustic and articulatory aspects of speech sounds, and phonology describes how these speech sounds are organized in a given language. For bilinguals, their speech is influenced by internal mechanics of speech sound acquisition and cognitive representations, and external social factors (e.g., who speaks the languages around them, how often, in what contexts). The long-term objective of my research program is to bring these internal mechanisms and external factors together towards understanding HOW bilingual children achieve accurate, adult-like speech production with particular attention to the phonetic-phonological interface. This research is an essential step to extending models of speech sound acquisition and representation to bilingual children. I am uniquely positioned to address both the internal mechanics, as described in the present proposal, and the external factors (parallel stream of SSHRC funding). The short-term objective of my research program is to understand how bilingual children use statistical and usage-based learning to build rich cognitive representations of speech sounds. This series of studies will provide insight as to how bilingual children use statistical and usage-based learning to build rich cognitive representations of speech sounds. They will provide key information about variability of typical bilingual development and provide insight to how components of perception and production work together to build accurate phonological representations. In contrast with previous research that focuses on the development of a single component of phonological acquisition, this research program adopts a powerful approach that incorporates multiple components of phonological representation. We gain statistical power by using common set of measures across studies allowing for pooling of results across children and languages. We will contribute much needed data from bilingual children. A developmental trajectories model of phonological acquisition will contribute to understanding how children achieve accurate, adult-like speech production with particular attention to the phonetic-phonological interface. This understanding will improve the identification of bilingual children with delayed development by clinicians and educators, and allow for supports and interventions designed for bilingual development.