Infant Studies Center

Principal Investigator: Jessica Maye, Ph.D j-maye@northwestern.edu Lab Location: Frances Searle Building 3-400 Lab Phone: (847)-491-2461; babyspeech@northwestern.edu

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Overview

Research in the Infant Studies Center investigates the earliest components of language acquisition. Before an infant can begin to learn words, she must first learn which sounds are used to form words in the native language. Much of the research in the lab focuses on how an infant's perception of speech sounds changes over the course of the first year of life, as the infant begins to develop native language phonetic categories. Experiments in the lab typically employ looking-time paradigms, in which the dependent measure is the infant's preference for one auditory stimulus compared to another, as indicated by how long the infant will look at a visual stimulus (a picture or a flashing light) to keep the sound playing.

Description of Lab Projects in Progress

• Learning phonetic categories from statistics
• The effect of phonology on infants' perception of speech

Papers Related to Lab Projects

• Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.
• Statistical cues facilitate infants' discrimination of difficult phonetic contrasts.

Links

Collaborators

Richard Aslin
Daniel Weiss
Janet Werker

Societies

Acoustical Society of America
International Society on Infant Studies
Society for Research on Child Development

Meetings

ASA Meetings
BU Conference on Language Development
International Conference on Infant Studies
SRCD Biennial Meeting

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