School of Social Sciences and Psychology Colloquium

'To the Edge and Back: How infants crack the speech code and discover their first words'

Bio Dr. Johnson received her BA from the University of Rochester, where she majored in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and completed a Take Five program in Developmental Biology & Evolution. She then earned her MA in Psychology and her PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University. During her final year of study at The Johns Hopkins University, she spent a semester visiting the Speech Group at MIT. After completing her Ph.D., Johnson accepted a post doc position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Johnson is now an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and the Director of the UTM Child Language and Speech Studies Lab (C.L.A.S.S. Lab). In 2012, Johnson was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Spoken Language Acquisition. Her primary graduate appointment is in Psychology, but she is also cross-appointed to the graduate Department of Linguistics. Abstract At about 12 months of age, children typically delight their parents by speaking their first word. Although first words are often viewed as the beginning of language abilities in the child, they are in reality only possible after a sturdy foundation of native language knowledge has been acquired. In this talk, I will review several obstacles children face in learning their first words, and discuss different hypotheses for how children overcome these hurdles. More specifically, I will explain how the continuous nature of the speech signal presents a challenge to infant language learners, and use experimental and corpus data to evaluate different learning strategies children might use to find word boundaries in fluent speech. In the end, I will conclude that infants are amazingly good at tracking statistical distributions in their input. However, their computational focus might be a little edgier than previously thought.

RSVP to: ssap-research@uws.edu.au