Dr Mits Ota: Research in a Nutshell
на канале: Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh
Mits Ota is a Reader in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh.
In this video Mits asks: Are the words we use specifically with infants characterized by sound patterns easier to learn? The answer may reveal an important mechanism in language learning.
Background:
My main area of work is developmental linguistics, the study of how language is acquired. In particular, I focus on the question of how we identify and store the sound forms of words which we use to recognize and produce words. How does the learner come to know the form characteristics of a new word? How do they represent that information in their mental lexicon? How is this process influenced by the learner’s knowledge of the language’s sound system, or their knowledge of other words in the language? These are the main questions that guide my research, and I test them in different learner populations, including infants, children, adults (learning a second language) and adults with different cognitive profiles associated with, for example, dyslexia or autism.
Recently I have also become interested in how phonology (i.e., the sound system of a language) influences word learning. Words with certain phonological characteristics appear to be easier to learn than others. This might explain why we often use baby-talk words: substitute lexical items for infants and young children, such as ‘choochoo’ and ‘tummy’. Across speech communities, these words tend to have similar sound patterns (e.g., the repetition of the same sound or syllables, the use of affixes that make the beginning or ending of words similar). There are different ways to test this idea. One, discussed in my video, is to expose young children to made-up words for unfamiliar objects. The speed at which the novel words are learned depending on their phonological shape will tell us whether the sound patterns often found in baby-talk words are motivated by the facilitative mapping between sounds and words. Another method is to study real words learned by children over time and examine their relationship with the different types of words they hear in the language addressed to them.
Find out more about Mits Ota: http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/people/mits-ota