The Developing Speaker

Young children’s early word productions often deviate from adult speech, reflecting ongoing development of lexical representations, motor planning, and articulation. Despite substantial progress in understanding adult speech production, the mechanisms underlying speech production development in typically developing children aged 1–3 years remain poorly understood. This workshop aims to develop an integrated view of speech development by combining insights from speech perception and production, lexical development, motor encoding, and self-monitoring to identify the sources of children’s deviating productions and the drivers of developmental change. Scientific aims are to disentangle the different contributions to early speech errors, to examine the role of self-monitoring and repair in learning, and to develop robust experimental methods suitable for toddlers. Outcomes include a collaborative research agenda, outlines for joint grant proposals, a position paper, and the establishment of an international research network. Together, these efforts will advance a mechanistic understanding of early speech development.