Child Development Research at Brown
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People have many different native languages. It is commonly estimated that there are about 5,000 languages in the world today, though many of these are endangered. If we ask why it is that some people are native speakers of English, others of Arabic, still others of Basque, or Cantonese, or Zulu, the answer is obvious: people are native speakers of particular languages because they were exposed to these languages early in childhood. Children's language acquisition is often celebrated as one of the most difficult and complex intellectual feats that we accomplish; our research asks how language exposure contributes to this accomplishment. There are two sides to this question. One concerns studying the information that is available in children's language exposure. Some studies in our lab investigate properties of speech addressed to infants and young children, particularly the acoustic, phonetic, and intonational information that may help young language learners to identify units relevant to language structure. Recently, we have begun to investigate the “visual prosody” that accompanies such speech – facial expressions and head movements that may give clues to meaning and structure. The other side of the question concerns studying the perceptual and cognitive abilities that infants may use to detect, extract, and exploit linguistic information available in their environments. Currently, we focus primarily on the part of this question that involves how infants learn to recognize spoken words in fluent speech. Please see my web page for more on why this is an interesting and important issue, some of the findings our research has provided, and a model of how naïve infants can master this challenging but crucial skill.
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