Marilyn Vihman

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Marilyn Vihman
Born1939 (1939) (age 85)
CitizenshipAmerican
SpouseEero Vihman
Academic background
Alma mater
ThesisLivonian Phonology, with an Appendix on Stod in Danish and Livonian (1971)
Doctoral advisorKarl Zimmer
Academic work
DisciplineLinguist
Sub-disciplineLanguage acquisition
InstitutionsUniversity of York

Marilyn May Vihman (b. 1939) is an American linguist known for her research on phonological development and bilingualism in early childhood. She holds the position of Professor of Linguistics at the University of York.[1]

Vihman is widely cited as an expert on language development.[2][3] Her views on infant babbling and the transition to intelligible, meaningful language have reached the mainstream media attention, including The New York Times,[4][5] and The Guardian.[6] According to Vihman, infant babbling paves the way to language as "kind of a predictor for being able to get word forms under control, so that you can make words that people will recognize.”[7]

Education[edit]

Vihman received her B.A. degree in Russian at Bryn Mawr College in 1961. She attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley where she obtained her Ph.D in Linguistics in 1971 under the supervision of Karl Zimmer.[8] Her dissertation titled Livonian Phonology, with an Appendix on Stod in Danish and Livonian, focused on Livonian, a critically endangered Finno-Ugric language that is closely related to Estonian.[8][9] Vihman received post-doctoral training at the Stanford Child Phonology Project, where she worked under the direction of Charles A. Ferguson.[10] Vihman's research with Ferguson emphasized individual differences and variability in infant babbling and first words, up to the point of having a 50-word vocabulary.[11]

Career[edit]

From 1980 to 1989, Vihman was Director of the Child Phonology Program at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Vihman conducted longitudinal research on six French-speaking infants in the late single-word period (approximate ages 10–18 months),[12] with the dataset made publicly available through PhonBank and CHILDES.[13] Vihman was also involved in creating the reference manual and user's guide for the Stanford Phonology Archive.[14][15]

Vihman was Associate Professor of Special Education at Southeastern Louisiana University from 1993 to 1995 and Professor of Developmental Psychology at Bangor University from 1996 to 2006. She moved to her current position at the University of York in 2007.[1] Her research on various topics in language acquisition, such as the effects of input on early word learning, late talking toddlers, phonological acquisition in multilingual settings, and production templates in phonological and lexical development, has been funded through grants from the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom.[16]

Books[edit]

Vihman is the author of Phonological Development: The Origins of Language in the Child [17][18] and the later edition Phonological Development: The First Two Years,[19] which offer a functionalist perspective on child phonology and the emergence of referential language.[20] In her most recent book Phonological Templates in Development,[21] Vihman adopts a dynamic systems perspective, emphasizing the role of templates, or preferred word forms, in early lexical development. Vihman proposes infants are initially attracted to words with sounds they can say.[22] If a word corresponds to a syllable that the infant already has in their repertoire, they will start making that syllable when the situation recurs and thus produce their first recognizable words.[23]

Vihman co-edited the volume The Emergence of Phonology: Whole-word Approaches and Cross-linguistic Evidence[24] with her former postdoc Tamar Keren-Portnoy.

Personal[edit]

Vihman met her husband, linguist Eero Vihman, in 1962.[23] Eero taught her Estonian, and together they raised their children Virve-Anneli and Raivo Vihman in California while communicating almost exclusively in Estonian at home.[25] Raivo's bilingual development has been featured in academic articles,[26][27] and cited as an example of language mixing in infant bilingualism.[28] Virve-Anneli Vihman is a member of the faculty of the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics at the University of Tartu;[29] she collaborated with her mother on a case study of early phonological development.[30]

Selected articles[edit]

  • Vihman, M. M. (1981). Phonology and the development of the lexicon: Evidence from children's errors. Journal of Child Language, 8(2), 239–264.
  • Vihman, M. M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual infant. Journal of Child Language, 12(2), 297–324.
  • Vihman, M. M. (1993). Variable paths to early word production. Journal of Phonetics, 21(1-2), 61–82.
  • Vihman, M. M. (2017). Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development. British Journal of Psychology, 108(1), 1-27.
  • Vihman M. & Croft W. (2007). Phonological development: Towards a “radical” templatic phonology. Linguistics, 45(4), 683–725.
  • Vihman, M. M. & McCune, L. (1994). When is a word a word? Journal of Child Language, 21(3), 517–542.

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "Marilyn Vihman - Language and Linguistic Science, The University of York". www.york.ac.uk. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  2. ^ "And the Young Shall Speak in Tongues". Los Angeles Times. 2001-01-27. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  3. ^ "Critical window for learning a language". BBC News. 2018-05-01. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  4. ^ Angier, Natalie (1991-03-22). "Deaf Babies Use Their Hands To Babble, Researcher Finds". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  5. ^ Requarth, Tim; Crist, Meehan (2013-06-30). "From the Mouths of Babes and Birds". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  6. ^ Davis, Nicola (2017-11-20). "Babies may be able to link certain words and concepts, research suggests". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  7. ^ "Why Do Babies Babble? » LiveScience". LiveScience. 2019-03-30. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  8. ^ a b "Livonian phonology, with an appendix on stød in Danish and Livonian | Linguistics". lx.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  9. ^ "Livonian language".
  10. ^ "Charles A. Ferguson". Language. 75 (4): 781–800. 1999. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 417734.
  11. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May; Ferguson, Charles A.; Elbert, Mary (1986). "Phonological development from babbling to speech: Common tendencies and individual differences". Applied Psycholinguistics. 7 (1): 3–40. doi:10.1017/S0142716400007165. ISSN 1469-1817. S2CID 145747523.
  12. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May; Macken, Marlys A.; Miller, Ruth; Simmons, Hazel; Miller, Jim (1985). "From Babbling to Speech: A Re-Assessment of the Continuity Issue". Language. 61 (2): 397–445. doi:10.2307/414151. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 414151.
  13. ^ "Stanford Corpus". phonbank.talkbank.org. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  14. ^ "PHOIBLE 2.0 -". phoible.org. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  15. ^ A Reference manual and user's guide for the Stanford Phonology Archive /. Stanford , Calif.: Phonology Archiving Project, Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford University. 1977.
  16. ^ "Prof. Marilyn Vihman - Research Database, The University of York". pure.york.ac.uk. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  17. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May. (1996). Phonological development : the origins of language in the child. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16353-0. OCLC 32432017.
  18. ^ Wells, Bill (1997). "Book Review: M. M. Vihman, Phonological development: the origins of language in the child. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996". Journal of Child Language. 24 (3): 781–788. doi:10.1017/S0305000997213255. ISSN 1469-7602. S2CID 145725067.
  19. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May. (2013). Phonological Development : the First Two Years (2nd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. ISBN 978-1-118-34282-4. OCLC 867318665.
  20. ^ Green, Sam (2015). "Book review: Marilyn M. Vihman,Phonological development: The first two years (2nd ed.)". First Language. 35 (6): 489–492. doi:10.1177/0142723715621850. ISSN 0142-7237. S2CID 148893056.
  21. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May (2019). Phonological templates in development. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-251212-3. OCLC 1129443395.
  22. ^ Swingley, Daniel (2017). "The infant's developmental path in phonological acquisition". British Journal of Psychology. 108 (1): 28–30. doi:10.1111/bjop.12215. ISSN 2044-8295. PMC 7232752. PMID 28059462.
  23. ^ a b "Intervjuu Marilyn May Vihman" (PDF).
  24. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May; Keren-Portnoy, Tamar (2013). The emergence of phonology : whole word approaches and cross-linguistic evidence. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-98050-3. OCLC 862077636.
  25. ^ "Why "Searching for My Roots" Also Means "Working on My Fluency"". Estonian World Review. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  26. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May (2002). "Getting started without a system: From phonetics to phonology in bilingual development" (PDF). International Journal of Bilingualism. 6 (3): 239–254. doi:10.1177/13670069020060030201. ISSN 1367-0069. S2CID 6104380.
  27. ^ Vihman, Marilyn May (1986). "More on language differentiation*". Journal of Child Language. 13 (3): 595–597. doi:10.1017/S0305000900006929. ISSN 1469-7602. PMID 3793819. S2CID 31226644.
  28. ^ Lanza, Elizabeth. (1997). Language mixing in infant bilingualism : a sociolinguistic perspective. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-823575-5. OCLC 35280679.
  29. ^ "Virve-Anneli Vihman". www.keel.ut.ee. 2012-12-19. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  30. ^ Vihman, Marilyn; Vihman, Virve-Anneli (2011), Clark, E. V.; Arnon, I. (eds.), "From first words to segments : A case study in phonological development", Experience, Variation, and Generalization, John Benjamins, retrieved 2020-02-02

External links[edit]

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