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How does children’s ability to structure spoken directions and communicate spatial information develop with age?
In this study, children will participate in a pretend storytelling game using a model village and pretend phones. They will imagine giving a friend directions to their house for a birthday party, identifying landmarks and explaining how to get from one location to another. Researchers will analyze children’s recorded speech to understand how they organize…
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Can children use present and past tense to learn the meanings of new words?
In this study, we are investigating whether children can use present and past tense to learn new words. Children will be familiarized with new words by watching videos of two girls, each doing an action (such as spinning a toy, stirring some water, etc.). While watching the videos, they will hear sentences in either present…
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How do bilingual infants develop the ability to predict upcoming words based on the sounds and language patterns they hear?
In this study, we are interested in how children develop phonological prediction. Bilinguals can hear and understand both languages in the same sentence, in what is known as code-switching. We want to learn how children learn to predict the next word in a sentence. We do this by showing children two images along with audio…
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At what age do children begin predicting the content of a question as they hear it?
In this study, we are interested in how children learn to process questions. Many studies have shown that when adults start to hear a question, they make predictions about what the rest of the question will be. This study investigates what age children show the same behavior by tracking where children look while they hear…
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How do infants learn the meanings of new verbs based on the sentence structures in which they hear them?
This study is looking at how children of this age learn the meanings of new verbs (action words). We play videos with people using made-up verbs, and then show a puppet performing different actions with a toy. We record where children are looking during these videos to see which action they think is a better…
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Do infants between 15 and 18 months recognize that certain verbs require an object and notice when it is missing from a sentence?
This study is looking at how children understand how certain verbs can be used in different sentence structures. The child first listens to a bunch of sentences with verbs that have both a subject and an object, like “A monkey! The mouse should hug him.” These verbs are special in English because you can’t use…
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Do 14-month-old infants prefer the more commonly heard glottal-stop pronunciation of familiar words over the canonical pronunciation, or do they accept both pronunciations as equivalent, suggesting that they have learned to associate the two sounds?
This study builds on some previous work from the lab that looked at the sounds that infants hear from their parents in their day-to-day lives and found that certain sounds (known as glottal-stops) were more common than the “prototypical” (or canonical) form at the end of words. In this experiment, we want to see whether…
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Do infants distinguish between events based on the number of participants involved, even before they learn words to describe those events, or are their responses driven by the physical properties of the visual scene?
In this study, we’re interested in how children see events in the world around them at very young ages, before they’ve started learning words that describe those events. In a previous study, we asked if 9-to-12-month-olds view a scene in which a girl takes a truck from a boy as involving three core participants: the…
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Do infants recognize different forms of the same word when the pronunciation of the verb stem remains consistent?
We want to see how children learn to map different forms of the same word to each other. In previous experiments, we’ve been testing whether babies can relate mee[t] with mee[ɾ]ing. The results indicate that they don’t realize that mee[t] and mee[ɾ]ing are related. Therefore, now we’re testing to see whether they know that mee[t]…
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Can infants use familiar words to identify and segment unfamiliar words that follow them in continuous speech?
In this experiment, we’re attempting to learn how infants segment words and word parts from running, continuous speech, because most of the words they hear are not in isolation, but in larger sentences. Specifically, we are looking to see if a familiar word, such as “Mommy,” can help infants identify the verb that follows (e.g.…
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At what age do infants begin recognizing Spanish verb inflections and understanding that different verb forms share a common root rather than representing entirely different words?
We’re investigating at what age infants learn different verb endings (inflections) in Spanish. In other words—do infants know that canta is ‘cant+a’, which is related to ‘cant+o’, cant+as, etc (at 6 months)? Or do they think these are entirely different words? (like ballet and balón, which start the same way but are not related). To…
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How do infants segment and recognize familiar sound patterns in continuous speech after brief exposure, and can they distinguish these patterns from unfamiliar sound combinations?
In this experiment, we’re attempting to learn how infants segment parts of words from running, continuous speech, because most of the words they hear are not in isolation, but in larger sentences. Specifically, we are looking to see if a familiar sound pattern can be recognized by infants after briefly being exposed to new sound…
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How do infants learn the sound patterns of their native language, and when do they begin distinguishing between sound sequences that are permitted versus not permitted in Spanish words?
This experiment seeks to examine the time course of infants’ learning of the sound patterns of their native language. For this purpose we first present infants with a speech stream which consists of both sound patterns that are allowed to form a single word in Spanish (permitted words) and ones that are not allowed to…
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How do children learn English sound sequences that are only possible when one of the sounds belongs to a suffix?
In this study, we look at how children learn a special class of sound sequences in English, namely, ones that are only possible when one of the sounds belongs to a suffix. For example, wugd cannot be the name of a novel species of animal, but if wug is a novel verb, its past tense…
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How do children use syntax to learn verb meanings?
Previous work finds that children use the syntax of a sentence with a new verb in order to make a guess about its meaning. One hypothesis proposes that children do this by using the number of arguments in a sentence: they expect a sentence with two arguments (a subject and an object) to describe an…
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How many participants do infants represent when they view events in the world?
In order to learn the meaning of a new verb, like take, children need to decide what kind of event in the world it labels, and whether that event tends to have one, two, or more core “participants.” Here, we asked how many participants infants readily perceive when viewing events in the world, independent of…
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Can 19-month-olds process wh-questions incrementally?
When adults hear a wh-question with a fronted object, like What is she wiping with the cloth?, they interpret what as the direct object of the verb wipe rapidly, as the sentence is unfolding in real-time. In our prior work, we found that 18-month-olds are able to represent the structure of these questions. Here, we…
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How does vocabulary development affect children’s comprehension of wh-questions?
Previous work found that children as young as 15 months sometimes behave as if they understand wh-questions. For instance, 15-month-olds who hear questions like Which monkey is the frog feeding? will prefer to look at a video where a frog feeds a monkey, compared to a video where a monkey feeds a frog. We asked…
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When do children represent complex syntactic dependencies?
One core property of syntax is the capacity to encode abstract grammatical dependencies that can hold at a distance. When does this property emerge in development? We studied this question by testing infants’ representations of wh-questions, in which a fronted wh-phrase can act as the argument of a verb at a distance. For example, in…
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Is infant babbling altered by short term exposure to a second language?
In this study, we analyze the babbling of monolingual infants who have been exposed to Spanish in experimental settings for 30 minutes – 5 hours. Preliminary results show that with just 5 hours of exposure to Spanish, monolingual English learning infants are able to systematically alter their babbling when interacting with a Spanish versus an…
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What information do babies use to distinguish between languages?
Previous research shows that infants are born with the ability to distinguish between different languages, as long as those languages are prosodically distinct – that is, as long as they have very different rhythms and intonation patterns. Infants cannot distinguish between prosodically similar languages – for example, English and German – until a later age,…
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Do infants show a preference for looking at faces talking in their native language?
Infants have been known to be able to distinguish between two languages using just the visual cues to speech – the movement of the mouth and rest of the face. In this study, we ask whether infants show a preference for their native language when they just have access to the visual cues to speech. …
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How do monolingual and bilingual English and Spanish learning infants distinguish vowels?
Research on monolingual infants shows that speech perception abilities of infants are affected by their language experience. Although there are no exact statistics available, it has been suggested that there are as many, if not more, children growing up bilingual than monolingual (Tucker, 1998). Despite the growing bilingual population, as researchers, we have few answers concerning…
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How do monolingual and bilingual infants segment words from continuous speech?
In this study, we investigate whether monolingual English, monolingual Spanish and bilingual English-Spanish infants can find words in Spanish and English. We found that even monolingual English 8-month-olds succeed at finding Spanish words like SALsa that start with a stressed syllable. This replicates results from English-acquiring infants segmenting English words (they succeed with DOCtor). However,…
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When are English-learning infants sensitive to the distribution of sound sequences in their native language?
In this experiment, we presented English-learning 5-month-olds with two sets of lists of monosyllables – one had English sounds that are common (e.g. boir, koof) and the other had English sounds that are uncommon (e.g., choiz, shuth). Infants were tested using the Headturn Preference Procedure[MS1] . English-learning 5-month-olds listened longer to lists with the more common English sounds, indicating that they…
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Can infants learn a specific sound change? Are they biased towards one type of change over another?
Previous research has shown that infants are sensitive to phonetic similarity when learning phonological patterns (Steriade, 2001/2008; White, 2014). Our goal for this study was to see if infants’ willingness to generalize newly learned phonological alternations depend on the phonetic similiarity of the sounds involved. We exposed 12-13-month-olds to words from an artificial language whose…
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When do American-English infants learn that /d/ and /t/ alternate with a tap?
In English, some sounds change depending on the context. The verb ‘pat’ ends in a “hard” [t], but when used in the word ‘patting’, the [t] becomes a ‘ tap’. We’ve tested 8 and 12mo olds on their ability to associate ‘pat’ to ‘patting’, as well as ‘pad’ (ending in a softer consonant) to ‘padding’.…
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When does the transition from mere associative understanding to referential understanding of nouns emerge?
Infants’ ability to recognize and reference the meaning of familiar words gradually increases over the 2nd year of life. Initially, infants’ understanding of familiar words is restricted to certain contexts containing cues to aid recognition. Although at the beginning of word learning these cues are essential to highlighting novel word-object relationships, eventually the infant must…
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What are the cues that infants use to segment vowel-initial words?
In this experiment, babies listened for a minute or two to a passage. Then, we played them words that were present in the passage and words that were not. If babies correctly segment the words, they are expected to listen longer to words present in the passage. We asked if 11-month-olds who have a hard…
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When do infants start segmenting English verbs and morphemes?
In this set of studies, we ask whether monolingual English-learning 6-month-olds are able to pull out conjugated verbs (i.e., ‘smile’ in ‘Mommy smiles’) in stories where they follow the familiar word “mommy/mama”. Our results show that not only can 6-month-olds pull out these verbs, they can also relate them to the bare form of the…
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