George Hollich

Trends and Transitions in Language Development: Looking for the Missing Piece

In this article, we show that developmental neuropsychology can make significant inroads into the study of language acquisition. The 1st section describes new methodological developments in the field of language acquisition, including the headturn preference procedure (e.g., Fernald, 1985; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996a). The 2nd section shows how these new methods are altering our view of the process of acquisition and placing more emphasis on the period prior to the emergence of speech. The 3rd section presents a profile of language acquisition, reviewing recent research in the areas of phonological, lexical, and syntactic development. Using Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoffs (1996a) coalition model as a base, we examine major transitions in the landscape of development. Finally, we conclude that the transitions observed in the behavioral data offer ripe opportunities for the use of conve...

Talker variation and word learning

While infants must go beyond talker‐specific information in recognizing a given word, regardless of the talker, they must also process talker‐specific information in order to extract meaning from a particular sound source. Otherwise, for example, they could never recognize whether [hct] referred to a talker’s pronunciation of hot, hut, or even hat. This poster suggests that not only do infants process talker‐specific information, but they also make use of it both to extract invariant properties in learning a new word and in recognizing talker‐specific tokens faster. Using the splitscreen preferential looking paradigm, two studies were conducted that examined how talker‐specific properties and variation among talkers could facilitate word learning. Results of study 1 indicated that word learning was facilitated in the case where infants heard different talkers. Thus, talker variation is critical for the extraction of invariant properties of a word. However, the results of study 2 indicated that talker‐spec...

Infant sensitivity to lexical neighborhoods during word learning

Competition from existing lexical items that share similar phonotactic and phonetic properties could inhibit a child’s ability to encode new items. Two studies are reported that examine infant’s abilities both to detect the similarity among these ‘‘lexical neighbors,’’ words that differ by a single phoneme, and to learn a referent for a novel neighbor after an exposure to a high number of these similar sounding words. In study 1, 15‐month‐old infants exhibited a novelty preference for a neighborhood prototype after being familiarized with twelve lists of twelve neighbors. This suggests that infants are capable of detecting neighborhood similarity among words. In study 2, 17‐month olds were tested on their ability to learn the referents of two novel prototypes after being exposed to their respective lexical neighbors. In the high‐density condition, six lists of twelve neighbors were used. The low‐density condition consisted of six lists of three neighbors plus nine filler items. Results indicated that word...

Cocktail party effect in infants: Visual information and speech segmentation in noise

What are infants abilities to use what they see to segment speech in a noisy environment? Infants often find themselves in situations far louder and more complex than the acoustic isolation chambers of traditional infant testing. The current series of studies used the headturn preference procedure (with video familiarization) to examine 7.5‐month‐old infants abilities to use visual/auditory correlations to reliably attend to and segment a given speech stream in the face of a distracting voice. Results indicated that in contrast to seeing a static face, infants succeeded at segmentation when a dynamic visual display of the face of the talker matched the acoustic passage. That is, when two blended voices were of equal loudness, infants could use visual correspondences to reliably recognize words presented in the matching video. Furthermore, they did so even if the video display was changed to a synchronized oscilloscope pattern, rather than a face. They also succeeded when the video display was simply a syn...