Jan Edwards, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Education

B.A.   Barnard College
M.S.   M.I.T.
Ph.D. Graduate Center of CUNY

Teaching

CD 315  Phonetics and Phonological Disorders
CD 750  Capstone - Pediatric
CD 900  Theory to Practice

Research Statement

My research aims to better understand phonological development—the process of learning to talk—in preschool children. Although most adults take the ability to speak for granted, children who are learning language must actually acquire and synthesize a complex system of sounds, words, and social understanding. Doing so competently supports future language development, reading ability, and academic achievement. My research program comprises the three projects below. For more information, visit: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/ . 

1.  Interactions between vocabulary growth and phonological acquisition.  In this project, we examine the interaction between learning words and learning the sounds in words in a group of children aged 30 to 60 months. We focus on children at risk for small vocabularies: late talkers, children from low-socioeconomic status families, and children with cochlear implants. This study builds on two key findings in our previous research: 1) children produce high-frequency sounds and sequences more accurately than low-frequency sounds; and 2) the larger the child’s vocabulary, the smaller the effect of frequency on accuracy. Our goal is to find ways to help at-risk children develop the skills to acquire a large number of words quickly and efficiently. We hope this will positively affect their later language development and early reading. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD Grant 02932) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-0729140), and is conducted in collaboration with Mary Beckman at Ohio State University and Ben Munson at University of Minnesota.

2.  Cross-linguistic phonological acquisition.  In this project, we examine how variations across languages, such as the frequency of specific sounds and sound sequences, affect how children acquire different languages. For example, Greek-speaking children acquire the “th” sound earlier than English-speaking children. The “th” sound occurs more frequently in Greek than in English. In addition, adult native-language perceptions influence which sounds are acquired earlier, and which errors occur more frequently. For example, in English, “s” is acquired earlier than “sh,” and “s” for “sh” errors are common. The exact opposite is true in Japanese. We have studied these differences in American English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin, and are currently studying them in French and Taiwanese. By studying phonological acquisition across language, we can distinguish between language-specific and language-universal effects. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD Grant 02932) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-0729140), and is conducted in collaboration with Mary Beckman at Ohio State University and Ben Munson at University of Minnesota.

3.  The impact of dialect mismatch on academic achievement.  In this project, we examine how children who speak a different dialect—specifically, African American English (AAE)—have a harder time learning in schools where the language of instruction is Standard American English (SAE). We are particularly interested in how this dialect mismatch influences children’s comprehension of SAE, and how much young children who speak AAE know about the two different dialects prior to school entry. This research lays the groundwork for future interventions designed to lessen the effects of dialect mismatch. These interventions, in turn, may help close the “achievement” gap among AAE-speaking public school students. This research is supported by an internal UW-Madison grant and is conducted in collaboration with Mark Seidenberg, Maryellen Macdonald, and David Kaplan.

 

Representative publications

Edwards, J., Munson, B., & Beckman, M. E. (2011).  Lexicon-phonology relationships and dynamics of early language development. Journal of Child Language, 38, 35-40. [PMC2999667]


Li, F., Munson, B., Edwards, J., Yoneyama, K., & Hall, K.C. (2011). Language specificity in the perception of voiceless sibilant fricatives in Japanese and English: Implications for cross-language differences in speech-sound development. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129, 999-1011.


Graf-Estes, K., Edwards, J., & Saffran, J. (2011).  Phonotactic constraints on infant word learning.  Infancy, 16, 180-197. [PMC3032547]


Munson, B., Edwards, J., Schellinger, S., Beckman, M.E., & Meyer, M. (2010).  Deconstructing phonetic transcription: language-specificity, covert contrast, perceptual bias, and an extraterrestrial view of vox humana. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 24, 245-260. [PMC2941432]

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