May 2
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Gerken:2008
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p. 175: "One class of hypotheses is based on the observation that
infants show a decline in non-native consonant discrimination at
roughly the period of development that they begin to recognize and
produce first words (e.g., Best, 1995; Jusczyk, 1985; MacKain, 1982;
Werker & Pegg, 1992)"

  First, my intuition tells me that infants should actually show an
increase in consonant discrimination, eg. begin to recognize and
ignore non-native sounds (because they don't carry meaning like
native-sounds do).  Am I misinterpreting this?

  Second, I'm wondering how infant discrimination of sounds was
operationalized in the experiments. (in fact, in most of the
experiments in the paper, how 'interest' or attention' or
‘discrimination’ or lack thereof in patterns/phonemes/words/etc. is
operationalized is not mentioned and I think these methods would
provide a great deal of discussion when interpreting results…)

p176: "On this view, an English-learning infant might hear a continuum
of different degrees of aspiration on word final stops, with most of
the values clustering around a particular point in the acoustic
distribution. That is, English-learning infants are likely to hear a
unimodal distribution of aspiration."

  How can a sound be aspirated in different degrees or on a continuum?

Many studies in the paper show that infants can generalize sound
patterns learned during the experiment 'training' phase to unseen test
examples. However it seems that these trained patterns use sounds from
the infant's native language. It would be interesting to see the
results of an experiment in which an infant is trained on sound
patterns of a non-native language and see if they perform worse in
generalization (I would imagine so).

  Is there any correlation between infants' sensitivity to different
linguistic form and determining if a structure is difficult to
comprehend or not?

  What evidence suggests that infants are sensitive to the word order
and syntactic categories even before they completely comprehend the
meaning?

According to the paper, infants are sensitive to the ordering of
word-like units before they become sensitive to the basic categories
of phonology. How is it possible for children to know about the
context in which certain words appear if they are not even able to
segment words phonologically?

How can the sensitivity to syntactic form (e.g. word order) be
influenced by bilingual L1 acquisition? (Especially if the rules
concerning word order differ between the two acquired languages)

Authors highlight the ability of child to identify the word order and
generalize it. However, I feel that this opinion is generally stated
keeping in mind about the languages with fixed word orders. What about
the cases where the child's native language has flexible word order?
(Because one utterance can be presented in different word orders and
the authors also highlight that there is no semantic inference during
the period of testing)

What are the probable reasons for having earlier vowel inventory
sensitivity in infants?

How are the tests conducted for the results presented and referred in
the paper? Is it plainly the analysis from eye tracking or did some
studies use the brain wave?

In this paper, it was hinted that cross-linguistic differences existed
in language development. This of course relates to difference in each
individual language morpho-syntactic and phonological rules. I was
wondering, what implications (if any) can the way children, who are
learning different languages, handle linguistic structures (e.g., word
order, inflectional morphology, phonology...) have for language
teaching (2nd language acquisition)?

Continuing on my previous question, is there agreement on how do these
typological differences influence language acquisition processes -
i.e. is there a group of languages for which there is a significantly
different sequence of linguisitc structures being learnt by
infants/children from that observed for English speaking children
(since English is the most investigated and reported language in these
studies)?

"in some studies discrimination is reflected in greater attention to
familiar forms, while in other studies there is greater attention to
novel forms." (p. 174)-- Are there individual preferences for familiar
or novel forms? How do researchers know that infants are actually able
to discriminate between these two forms and that the results are not
influenced by any confounding variables?

The studies mentioned in the article discuss infants in general, but
are there any gender differences in sensitivity to linguistic form?