Children’s linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers’ often-siloed focus on either...
Most automatic speech processing systems register degraded performance when applied to noisy or reverberant speech. But how can one tell whether speech is noisy or reverberant? We propose Brouhaha, a neural network jointly trained to extract speech/non...
The present study investigated infants’ knowledge about familiar nouns. Infants (n = 46, 12–20-month-olds) saw two-image displays of familiar objects, or one familiar and one novel object. Infants heard either a matching word (e.g. “foot’ when seeing foot...
As researchers who rely on federal funding and community participation, we have an obligation to return scientific knowledge to the community. Our outreach goals are to share information about language development and sensory impairments, introduce...
It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just...
Interoperable annotation formats are fundamental to the utility, expansion, and sustainability of collective data repositories. In language development research, shared annotation schemes have been critical to facilitating the transition from raw acoustic...
Recent research reported the surprising finding that even 6-mo-olds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:3253–3258]. However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like older learners? We test 6-mo...
Child-directed speech is argued to facilitate language development, and is found cross-linguistically and cross-culturally to varying degrees. However, previous research has generally focused on short samples of child-caregiver interaction, often in the...
For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a “30 Million Word Gap” between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have...
