Children's Speech Development and Perception

Head to room 151 of ComArtSci from 12:00 - 12:50 p.m. on Friday, October 20th, to hear from Dr. Anne Michelle Tessier, Research Investigator, at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. Tessier is also an adjunct professor in linguistics at Simon Fraser University and an adjunct research faculty at ComArtSci.

This talk is about children’s development of English speech production and speech perception, focusing on the development of word-initial consonant clusters. Each of the studies attempts to refine our understanding of the trajectories seen in children’s acquisition of English sound structure: the ways and rates at which they improve, revise, regress and so on.

The results demonstrate a remarkable flexibility in early phonological development, with consequences for how language sounds are represented in the mind in childhood and beyond.