Perception and Processing of Prosodic Information in Infancy

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To successfully acquire language, a child must learn about words - what they are and what sound combinations make a possible word - and they must learn how words group together to form sentences. Remarkably, infants acquire a great deal of their language within the first 2 years of life. My research examines how babies begin to make sense of the language around them even before they are able to speak. One way an infant can 'bootstrap' acquisition is by attending to highly salient information in speech. In particular, babies attend to and like listening to the rhythm of language. Rhythm is part of the prosodic property of speech, which also includes word stress (exaggerated syllables, such as the first part of the word 'baby'). Prosodic information highlights linguistic structure such as phrases and sentence boundaries. The overarching goal of my research is to test how the perception and processing of prosodic information - specifically word stress - facilitates the detection of linguistic structure in the speech input and bootstraps word learning. This research program endeavours to explain the dynamic process of acquiring word knowledge and to elucidate the mechanisms that infants use to learn about words. A comprehensive exploration of the processes underlying word learning involves consideration of multiple sources of influence, from basic speech perception, to the use of complex structures to establish word-referent relationships, such as infants' use of sentences to glean word meaning. The proposed experiments reflect these multiple levels of influence on early word learning. With the complexity of the language system (sounds, words, meanings, sentences), determining when and how infants identify and build structure over the first years of life will contribute to the advancement of theories and models of development and language processing in general. My findings will be of interest to cognitive and developmental psychologists, and will be of particular interest to NSE scientists because understanding speech development is necessary for discovering neurological and physiological underpinnings of the behaviour and for the advancement of speech technologies, such as speech recognition systems.