Research Topics

How do listeners infer likely word boundaries in fluent speech? How do infants acquire the language-specific segmentation heuristics needed to solve the word segmentation problem?

What makes a talker particularly memorable? How does learning a language change the way we identify talkers? Why do children take so long to develop adult-like talker recognition abilities?

How do infants and toddlers know which dimensions of speech variation to attend to and which to ignore? What information influences how readily a word or speech sound is identified correctly by a child?

How do children learn to process the speech signal and acquire language when they are routinely exposed to multiple languages, dialects, and/or accents?

How well do young children understand other-accented speech? Do they adapt to newly encountered accents in the same way as adults? What contexts facilitate adaptation by infants and toddlers?

When and why do children start making language-based social inferences about their interlocuters? Which factors impact the development of accent biases the most?

When and how do children develop their own unique voice? What factors influence how they speak, and/or who children choose to imitate?

What type of co-speech gestures do caregivers produce? Do children use these gestures to segment words from speech and resolve referential ambiguity?

What strategies do toddlers use to work out the meaning of new words and expand their vocabulary?

Do children process speech more efficiently when they hear it spoken by themselves or a close acquaintance (e.g., their own mother)? How do talker familiarity effects compare in children and adults?

What is the relationship between speech perception and speech production? Does this relationship change over the course of development? Can the study of own-voice perception shed light on these questions?

When and how do children learn the grammatical words and morpho-syntax of their language? How do they use this information to more efficiently process and extract information from language?

What can children’s eye movements tell us about the concepts they automatically access as an utterance unfolds in real-time?

What is the nature of the speech input children receive, and how does this input influence their development?

Why do adults struggle to understand and identify child talkers? Do children process child speech better than adult speech, or do children struggle to understand and identify child talkers too?