Jan Edwards
PhD, Graduate Center of CUNY
Research Scientist
Professor, Communicative Disorders

Contact Information:
Waisman Center
UW-Madison
1500 Highland Avenue
Madison, WI 53705
Phone: (608) 262-6768
E-mail: jedwards2@wisc.edu
Web: Laboratory Website

Research Statement

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" is 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. Interactions between vocabulary growth and phonological acquisition: How does learning words interact with learning sounds in words? In our newest project (funded by NIDCD), we are examining this interaction in a longitudinal study of children from 30 to 60 months. We will focus, in particular, on children with small vocabularies for different reasons – late talkers, children from low-socioeconomic status families, and children with cochlear implants. In previous research, 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 (Edwards et al., 2004; Munson et al., 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. 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 nave Japanese listeners to classify intermediate productions as "sh", and the tendency for nave American listeners to classify intermediate productions as "s" (Edwards & Beckman, 2008; Li, et al., 2011).

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, Maryellen Macdonald, and David Kaplan. 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.

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]

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. [PMC2772077]