Jul 18
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StoelGammon/VogelSosa:2008
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In the beginning of the paper the authors highlight the importance of
the creation of a link between the tactual and kinesthetic sensations
and the acoustic output during the babbling phase. In this context, I
was wondering how children that are hard of hearing/deaf babble and
what their early linguistic development looks.

P248 (Section "Natural Phonology") proposes a theory: "A child is born
with a predetermined, universal set of phonological processes that
dictate the form of his productions" and that, "the act of acquiring a
language-specific phonology consists of learning the constraints a
language imposes on these natural processes". Is this innate set of
phonological processes determined by anatomical/physiological
capabilities of the human speech system? How else could they be
innate?

What are influences of prosody in the initial lexical development?

How can the balance between predictability and novelty in high
neighborhood density environments influence individual differences in
children's language learning and processing capabilities? Is it
correct that when children are exposed to highly predictable patterns
(low surprisal), they can learn those patterns better?