Perceptual tuning and language acquisition

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The acquisition of language is one of the crowning achievements of our species. My research focuses on understanding how language acquisition begins in infancy, long before the child is speaking or even has any understanding of the content, other than the emotional tone, of the language spoken around them. A fundamental insight that is required for language acquisition is that words are names for things. To learn the names for things, infants need to establish two interlocking kinds of categories: 1) they need to know what the category essences and boundaries are for the "things" in the world they will ultimately name, and 2) they need to learn the speech sound categories that can be used to distinguish one possible word from another in their language (e.g. in English, but not Japanese, "reet" vs. "leet" are two possible distinct words since English, but not Japanese, distinguishes "r" from "l"). Most researchers study the acquisition of object categories and speech sound categories separately, at the most, suggesting that, in the presence of a word, babies are better able to learn the defining features of object categories (e.g. a chair vs. a sofa). In this grant, I propose that babies learn about object categories and speech sound categories in tandem. Not only do babies learn object categories better in the presence of words, but they also figure out the speech sound categories of their language when they hear those sounds accompanied by distinct objects. To test these hypotheses, four sets of studies are proposed using both non-invasive neural imaging and behavioral tasks.