PerPLex is a project about the speech perception (how a child perceives speech) and speech production of lexical items (words) of toddlers.
Young children often do not yet 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 is it because they did not (yet) perceive or store the word correctly? And how do these children eventually learn to say ‘truck’ instead of ‘tuk’? These questions are the focus of the research project PerPLex.
The main aspect studied in PerPLex is children’s monitoring. Monitoring is when children compare their own pronunciation of a word to their expectation of how a word would be pronounced by someone else or by themselves. For example, if someone else says ‘truck’, a child may compare it with their own storage ‘tuk’ (in case the child did not (yet) store the word correctly). When the child notices the difference between these it may update their expectation from ‘tuk’ to ‘truck’.
