Marilyn Vihman | University of York (original) (raw)

Papers by Marilyn Vihman

The effect of literacy and orthographic similarity on cross-language interference in bilingual ch... more The effect of literacy and orthographic similarity on cross-language interference in bilingual childre

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 7, 2013

Journal of Child Language, Jun 1, 1997

Journal of Child Language, Feb 1, 1999

First language, Jun 6, 2022

Psychological Review, Nov 1, 2022

Phonological memory, or the ability to remember a novel word string well enough to repeat it, has... more Phonological memory, or the ability to remember a novel word string well enough to repeat it, has long been characterized as a time-limited store. An alternative embodiment model sees it as the product of the dynamic sensorimotor (perceptual and production) processes that inform responses to speech. Keren-Portnoy et al. (2010) demonstrated that this capacity, often tested through nonword repetition and found to predict lexical advance, is itself predicted by the first advances in babbling. Pursuing the idea that phonological memory develops through vocal production, we trace its development-drawing on illustrative data from children learning six languages-from the earliest adult-like vocalizations through to the first words and the consolidation of early words into an initial lexical network and more stable representational capacity. We suggest that it is the interaction of perceptual and production experience that mediates the mapping of new forms onto lexical representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Word Structure

We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative s... more We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) and the agreement categories of number and gender, as well as having four morphological types that create an additional dimension of complexity for children to learn. These demonstrative types are each associated with a range of syntactic functions with partial overlaps. From nearly seven hours of recordings, including children at three age points (2;0, 2;6 and 3;0), we extracted 218 demonstrative tokens from the children’s speech, matched with 205 tokens from a sub-sample of caregiver speech. The youngest children can be described as restricting their use of demonstratives to a small set of learned items, with evi...

Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition, 2018

Language Learning and Development, 2023

Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms can be understood as st... more Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms
can be understood as structural mappings from their adult targets. In contrast,
the whole-word phonology model suggests that on beginning word
production children represent adult targets as holistic units, reflecting not
the exact sound sequence but only the most perceptually salient elements or
those that align with their own vocal patterns. Here we ask whether the
predictions of the whole-word model are supported by data from children
learning Japanese or Mandarin, both languages with phonotactic structures
differing from any so far investigated from this perspective. The Japanese
child word forms are found to include some characteristics suggestive of
whole-word representation, but in Mandarin we find little or no such evidence.
Instead, some children are found to make idiosyncratic use of whole
syllables, substituting them for target syllables that they match in neither
onset nor rime. This result, which neither model anticipates, forces reconsideration
of a key tenet of the whole-word model – that early word production
is based on word-size holistic representations; instead, at least in some
languages, the syllable may serve as the basic representational unit for child
learners.