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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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