Articles on child speech research

Research articles - Work post-PhD

My most recent presentation of the ideas in Part 1 of my thesis was at the Embodied Speech conference in Paris in 2019. My presentation was called, Speech timing phenomena: the role of child speech breathing

Building on Part 2 of my thesis, Ian Howard and I worked on how L1 speech sounds are developed using a computer model of an infant, that we called Elija:

Howard I.S. and Messum P.R. (2011) Motor Control. Modeling the development of pronunciation in infant speech acquisition
Howard I.S. and Messum P. (2014) PLoS ONE. Learning to Pronounce First Words in Three Languages: An Investigation of Caregiver and Infant Behavior Using a Computational Model of an Infant

Our most recent account of how children start to develop the inventory of L1 sounds is:

Messum P. and Howard I.S. (2015) Journal of Phonetics. Creating the cognitive form of phonological units: The speech sound correspondence problem in infancy could be solved by mirrored vocal interactions rather than by imitation

Ian Howard and I were invited to comment on an experiment reported by MacDonald et al. (2012) in Current Biology:

Messum P. and Howard I.S. (2012) Current Biology. Speech development: toddlers don't mind getting it wrong

Research articles - 2007 PhD

If you would like to see my thesis exactly as submitted then download:

Messum P.R. (2007) The Role of Imitation in Learning to Pronounce, PhD thesis, London University.

However, for more efficient printing you might prefer a single-spaced version:

Messum P.R. (2007) Role of Imitation (A4)
Messum P.R. (2007) Role of Imitation (US letter)

Alternatively, you might like to see just the abstract and table of contents.

Part 1 of the thesis dealt with how timing relationships emerge from the breath stream dynamics of child speech rather than through being imitated (modelled). (I.e. how English, for example comes to have long and short vowels, pre-fortis clipping, 'stress-timed' rhythm, and so on.)

Part of it was summarised in:

Messum P.R. (2008) Embodiment, not imitation, leads to the replication of timing phenomena. In: Proceedings of Acoustics '08 Paris: SFA/ASA/EAA, 2405-2410.

Early versions were summarised in:

Messum P.R. (2005) Learning to talk: a non-imitative account of the replication of phonetics by child learners. In: Chatzidamianos G. (ed.) CamLing 2005: Proceedings of The University of Cambridge Third Postgraduate Conference in Language Research, 99-109
Messum P.R. (2003) Invariance of effort in child speech breathing as a 'fast and frugal' heuristic for the acquisition of durational phenomena in stress-accent languages. In: Solé, M.J., Recasens, D., Romero, J. (eds) 15th ICPhS, 2007-2010 Barcelona: Causal Productions.

Part 2 of the thesis, dealing with the replication of speech sounds, was summarised in Messum P.R. (2007) How children learn to pronounce and in a poster Messum P.R. (2007) ASA New Orleans.

I would recommend looking at these before reading Part 2 (which is rather long), to get the gist of the argument. The argument is, of course, also developed in the 2015 Journal of Phonetics article, but the original thesis makes many points that could not be included in the article.

Teaching pronunciation

Articles that apply these ideas to the teaching of pronunciation (of English and other languages), are now all collected at the PronSci downloads site.

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