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

Jan Edwards’ research focuses on the interactions between phonological acquisition and lexical acquisition.  If children develop a phonological system based on generalizations over the lexicon, then children with larger vocabularies should have more finely-detailed phonological representations and, conversely, children with smaller vocabularies should have less finely-detailed phonological representations.  Also, there should be an interaction between phonological development and lexical development.  Jan has developed a line of research, to examine the phonological and lexical development of both typically developing children (Edwards, Beckman, and Munson, 2004) and children with phonological disorders (Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005).


Jan’s current research, in collaboration with Mary Beckman of Ohio State University, is a cross-linguistic study of phonological acquisition (the paidologos project). They are examining the acquisition of word-initial consonants in four languages: English, Greek, Japanese, and Cantonese.  Currently, they are collecting data in Columbus, OH; Thessaloniki, Greece; Tokyo, Japan; and Hong Kong.  Pilot results suggest that children learn the same sounds at different orders and rates, depending on what language they are learning.  For example, English-acquiring children produce “s” before “sh” (and substitute “s” for “sh”), while Japanese-acquiring children produce “sh” before “s” (and substitute “sh” for “s”).  These language-specific differences in acquisition are related to differences in relative consonant frequency in the different languages, as well as to acoustic-auditory and articulatory-motor differences in how the sounds are perceived and produced in a particular language.

Highlighted Activities

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.

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.

Edwards, J., Beckman, M. E., & Munson, B. (2004).  The interaction between vocabulary size

     and phonotactic probability effects on children’s production accuracy and fluency in

     nonword repetition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 421-436.

Beckman, M. E., Yoneyama, K., & Edwards, J. (2003). Language-specific and language-universal

     aspects of lingual obstruent productions in Japanese-acquiring children. Journal of the

    Phonetic Society of Japan, 7, 18-28.

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