At present very little is known about language development in prelinguistic infants and young children. However, research has demonstrated that infants do learn about their language over the first several months ,particularly in terms of the language's sound structure. The first goal of the research proposed here is to assess what elements of language are learned by infants using general psychological learning mechanisms capitalizing on the speech infants hear around them. This will be done through computational modeling of corpora of speech to young children, and through perceptual experiments with infants. The second goal of the research is to create a procedure capable of assessing individual children's development of accurate memory for words. This procedure will then be used to investigate possible sources of variation between children in word learning, word representation, and efficiency in understanding speech. Longitudinal studies of one-year-old infants will examine the development of adult like forms of words, and why individual infants may differ in early language learning.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32)
Project #
5F32HD008307-02
Application #
2796789
Study Section
Human Development and Aging Subcommittee 3 (HUD)
Project Start
1998-09-15
Project End
Budget Start
1998-09-15
Budget End
1999-09-14
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
1998
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Rochester
Department
Other Basic Sciences
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
208469486
City
Rochester
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
14627
Swingley, Daniel; Aslin, Richard N (2002) Lexical neighborhoods and the word-form representations of 14-month-olds. Psychol Sci 13:480-4
Swingley, D; Aslin, R N (2000) Spoken word recognition and lexical representation in very young children. Cognition 76:147-66