The Cognitive Modeling of Errors During the Japanese Phonological Awareness Formation Process

Both nature and nurture contribute to language development. In the case of phoneme segmentation, children have the natural ability to recognize a continuous sound in various units, but as they grow, they only selectively learn to recognize it as part of a series in the unit that is used in their mother tongue. This developmental process is supported by an ability called phonological awareness that allows children to become intentionally aware of units of phonology. It is known that erroneous pronunciation appears during the phonological awareness formation process. In this research, we aim to examine the factors that induce and reduce such errors. To do so, we modeled phonological awareness using the cognitive architecture ACT-R and performed simulations that manipulated ACT-R parameters that correspond to both nature and nurture factors. As a result, it was confirmed that errors due to a lack of phonological awareness can be modeled with the innate memory retrieval mechanism. We also observed that such errors were reduced when learning factors were added to the model. However, we could not simulate this learning process. In the future, we will study the interaction task that enables learning to reduce phonological errors and contribute to the acquisition of phonological awareness.