My research is primarily on the development and processing of
phonology and the lexicon in children and adults. Within those areas, I
am particularly interested in:
the development of prosodico phonology.
the relationship between phonological and lexical development.
the role of linguistic input in children’s language
development.
the processing of second-language phonological and lexical
information by adult speakers.
individual differences in phonological and lexical processing.
the relationship between language learning and general phonological
properties of languages.
Funded Projects
Language learning, communication and the emergence of phonotactic
constraints (ESRC)
Phonotactics, or restrictions on how linguistic sounds can be
combined in words, are specific to individual languages. But some
phonotactic patterns are typologically more common than others. For
instance, to various degrees, nearly all languages avoid transvocalic
consonants that share a major place of articulation (e.g., /keg/). In
this project, we test the idea that such asymmetries in phonotactic
patterns emerge during language transmission through the interaction of
pressures on learning and communication. Joint work with Kenny Smith and Annie Holtz.
The role of babytalk words in early language development (ESRC)
Why do most speech communities have a set of register-specific
vocabulary for young children (e.g., choochoo, tummy,
night-night)? Why do they share similar phonological
characteristics across languages? In this project, Barbora
Skarabela and I addressed these questions through a set of
experiments and corpus analysis testing the hypothesis that the shape of
these ‘babytalk words’ makes them easier to segment, learn and bootstrap lexical
development.
Here’s me talking about the project in a video for the “Before their
first word” project.
And similarly on BBC Radio 4 (my
segment from 6m23s).
Autistic traits and speech processing (British Academy and Autism
Speaks)
This collaboration with Mary
Stewart examined the relationship between autistic traits (including
those found in neurotypicals) and speech processing, in particular, categorical
perception and the effects of lexical information on speech
perception in children and adults.
The development of lexical and postlexical pitch phonology
(AHRC)
This project investigated how children learn the pitch components
that distinguish lexical contrasts and those that mark intonational
differences in languages that show complex interactions of the two, such
as Swedish (production)
and Japanese (production and recognition).
Phonological representations of second language words (British
Academy)
How do we represent the phonological information of words in a second
language? More specifically, what happens to sound contrasts that are
absent from our native language? To explore this issue, we used a range
of methods – semantic-relatedness
judgment, semantic category
judgment, novel
word learning – to measure the extent to which words differentiated
by a nonnative contrast (e.g., LOCK and ROCK for Japanese speakers of
English) are stored as “near-homophones” in our mental lexicon. In
collaboration with Rob
Hartsuiker, Sarah
Haywood, Satsuki
Nakai, and Shane
Lindsay.
Corpora
These are corpora of naturalistic child-adult interactions,
audio-recorded, transcribed in CHAT format, and made available from
CHILDES/PhonBank.
The
Edinburgh Corpus: 47 chidren growing up in Edinburgh, Scotland,
recorded at 9, 15 and 21 months of age. Funded by the ESRC and RSE.
The Ota
Corpus: 3 Japanese-learning children recorded approximately twice a
month between age 1 and 2.5
The
Falls Church Corpus: An English-Japanese bilingual child recorded
approximately twice a month over a year beginning at 1 year and 7
months.