BIOGRAPHY
I am interested in how the speech that infants and young children hear affects early language acquisition. My current research focuses on complementary questions of the nature of such speech, particularly with regard to properties that may cue aspects of language structure, and the nature of early perceptual capacities for extracting and representing the structural information that is cued. This work bears on the theoretical characterization of the initial state with regard to language learning: to the extent that input speech is rich in cues to structure that infants can represent appropriately, the need for imputing abstract grammatical knowledge to infants (as many recent theories have done) will be reduced.
Work in my lab on infant speech perception focuses on the problems of how infants solve the word-segmentation problem and the nature of early lexical representations. Although words must initially be no more evident to an infant than they are to an adult listening to a foreign language, well before the end of the first year infants are capable of recognizing at least some words in fluent speech. Studies with graduate students show that infants exposed to English begin between 6 and 9 months to deploy a bias for the strong-weak pattern that predominates in the language in grouping syllables and segmenting words. Other studies show that between these two ages infants also begin to utilize language-specific knowledge of phonotactics (concerning permissible sequences of sounds and their relative likelihoods) as an additional means of identifying word boundaries. Ongoing research is examining in detail the development of infants' recognition of familiar words in fluent speech.
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