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WE 4: Reduced syllables in typical and atypical language acquisition

This project aims to investigate the perception, categorization, and learning of canonical trochees in typically developing children and children with speech and language disorders. Canonical trochees with weak final schwa syllables are an early milestone of language development, achieved after distinct intermediate steps, and essential for successful grammatical development. Despite their significance in German language acquisition, the perception and production of reduced syllables have been understudied so far. It is unclear how children process and categorize schwa syllables and which factors influence successful learning of canonical trochees. A shortcoming in the literature is the dissociation of research on perception and production. Our approach unifies these aspects, promising to provide important insights into children’s representation of weak syllables with schwa. The data obtained will enrich our knowledge of the interactions between speech perception and lexical representations. In addition, reduced syllables represent a potential hurdle for children with atypical language development, such as Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) and Developmental Language Impairment (DLD). To date, these difficulties have mainly been described in terms of production errors. The present project goes beyond these apparent expressive symptoms by uncovering potential underlying processing deficits, thereby allowing for clinical implications for assessment and intervention.

Using a multi-method approach, we designed four experiments based on eye tracking and pupillometry methods to systematically investigate different levels of processing:

1.       Discrimination: sensitivity to vowel changes
2.       Perception of reduced syllables: word recognition in response to correctly and mispronounced word forms
3.       Categorization: anticipatory looking task to assess the classification of words based on their prosodic structure
4.       Learning: Interactive word learning task with familiar and novel words.

The experiments will be conducted with 90 typically developing children (aged 18-36 months), 30 children with early language delay (30-36 months), and 30 children with DLD/SSD (preschool and school age). Speech and language skills will be assessed using age-appropriate standardized tests. Taken together, the project addresses the processing, representation, and production of reduced syllables in child development, contributing to the overall goal of the RU to identify differences and commonalities in the processing of weak elements in both the mature and the developing language system.