I am PhD candidate at the First Language Acquisition research group of the Radboud University. I am curious how children acquire their first language. How do children learn the sounds of their first language? How do they learn to recognize words and produce them?
Young children often do not produce all words completely correct. For example, children can say ‘tuk’ when pointing to a truck. Why do some children say ‘tuk’ and not ‘truck’? Do they do this because they cannot articulate the word ‘truck’ or did they perceive/store the word differently when learning it?
These are the questions I am working on in the research project PerPLex. In this project, we study the link between speech production and perception in toddlers. We research this by making recordings of the words children say and by looking at what words they comprehend.