Current Research

My program of research is centered around the question of how young infants acquire their first words. This includes both the nature of their auditory representations; their understanding of how their environment can be segmented into meaningful objects, actions, and events; and the process by which young infants learn to connect these two.
     More specifically, current experiments being conducted in the Infant Language Research Lab here at Johns Hopkins examine how prior exposure to words, and word neighbors, affects infants' abilities to learn to map these onto moving objects.
     Other experiments currently under way are looking at how infants can use auditory-visual correspondence to help them follow a continous speech stream, in what can often be a noisy and distracting auditory environment.
     Below are links to stimuli and descriptions of these experiments, and descriptions of the paradigms we use in them.

 

Studies ___________________ Cocktail Party Word Learning Occlusion Study

Paradigms __________________ Interactive IPLP Splitscreen PLP HeadTurn Preference Procedure