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 550  Capstone - Pediatrics

Interests

My research focuses on understanding phonological development as the acquisition of a complex system that involves many different levels of representation.  The child’s task, as a language learner, is to learn these different levels and the mappings among them.  This involves making both lexical-phonetic generalizations (e.g., that the “k” in “coop” and the “k” in “keep” are the same sound) and socio-phonetic generalizations (e.g., that people speak different dialects and that it may be necessary to learn to code-switch in certain situations, such as at school).   My research program has been conducted mostly in collaboration with Mary Beckman at Ohio State University and Ben Munson at University of Minnesota.  This research is funded by both NIH (NIDCD Grant 02932) and NSF (BCS-0729140).  The project webpage is at http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/. 

Several different lines of research are the following:

1.  The interactions between phonological acquisition and lexical acquisition.  In particular, we have found that children are not learning sounds in isolation, but are learning sounds in words.  We have found that children produce high-frequency sounds and sequences more accurately than they produce low-frequency sounds and sequences.  Furthermore, there is an interaction between the effect of frequency and vocabulary size: the larger the vocabulary, the smaller the effect of frequency on accuracy.  We have interpreted this interaction as support for the claim that children gradually develop context-independent categorical representations of  phonemes, as they perceive and produce sounds in many different wordforms.  This research has been conducted with typically developing children and children with phonological disorders (Edwards, Beckman, and Munson, 2004; Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005).


2.  Cross-linguistic phonological acquisition.  We have found cross-linguistic differences in phonological acquisition that are related to differences in phoneme frequency and phoneme sequence frequency.  The languages that we have studied thus far are American English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin (work is in progress in French and Taiwanese).  For example, we have found that Greek-speaking children acquire the sound “th” (the first sound in “think”) considerably earlier than English-speaking children and this sound is relatively more frequent in Greek than in English.  Similarly, Japanese-speaking children acquire the sound “ch” (the first sound in “church”) earlier than English-speaking children and this sound is more frequent in Japanese than in English.  We have also found cross-linguistic differences in fine phonetic detail and have observed that these differences influence order of acquisition. For example, the prevoiced stops of Greek are acquired considerably earlier than the prevoiced stops of French and this seems to be because these voiced stops are optionally prenasalized in Greek, but not in French (Kong & Beckman, 2007).  We have also found that adult native-language perceptions influence what sounds are perceived to be acquired earlier and what error patterns are observed.  For example, a number of researchers have noted an asymmetry between English and Japanese acquisition of “s” and “sh”.  In English, “s” is acquired earlier than “sh” and “s” for “sh” errors are common.  By contrast, in Japanese, “sh” is acquired earlier than “s” and “sh” for “s” errors are common.  Li and colleagues have found that this asymmetry is related to a number of factors, including a more robust acoustic contrast between “s” and “sh” in English as compared to Japanese, the tendency for naïve Japanese listeners to classify intermediate productions as “sh”, and the tendency for naïve American listeners to classify intermediate productions as “s” (Li, Edwards, & Beckman, in press; Munson, Li et al., 2008).

3.  The impact of dialect mismatch on academic achievement.  This research is supported by an internal UW-Madison grant and is conducted in collaboration with Mark Seidenberg, Julie Washington, Martha Alibali, David Kaplan, Maryellen Macdonald, Monique Mills, Seth Pollak, and Jen Saffran.  We are interested in how speaking a different dialect makes learning more difficult for children who speak African American English (AAE) and are in schools where the language of instruction is Standard American English (SAE). 

In particular, we are interested in how the dialect mismatch influences comprehension of SAE and we are interested in how much young children who speak AAE know about the two different dialects prior to school entry.  Ultimately, we plan to develop interventions to mitigate the effects of dialect mismatch.

 

Highlighted Activities

Edwards, J., & Beckman, M.E. (2008). Methodological questions in studying phonological acquisition.  Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 22, 937-956.

Li, F., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M.E. (in press, 2008).  Contrast and covert contrast: The phonetic development of voiceless sibilant fricatives in English and Japanese toddlers.  Journal of Phonetics.

Edwards, J. & Beckman, M.E. (2008). Some cross-linguistic evidence for modulation of implicational universals by language-specific frequency effects in phonological development.  Language, Learning, and Development, 4, 122-156.

Ellis Weismer, S. & Edwards, J. (2006).  The role of phonological storage deficits in specific language impairment: A reconsideration.  Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 556-562.

Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman,M. E. (2005).  Relationships between nonword repetition accuracy and other measures of linguistic development in children with phonological disorders.  Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 61-78.

Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M. E. (2005).  Phonological knowledge in typical and atypical speech and language development: Nature, assessment, and treatment.  Topics in Language Disorders, 25, 190-206.

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