1997 — 1998 |
Swingley, Daniel |
F32Activity Code Description: To provide postdoctoral research training to individuals to broaden their scientific background and extend their potential for research in specified health-related areas. |
Lexical and Syntactic Development in Infancy @ University of Rochester
At present very little is known about language development in prelinguistic infants and young children. However, research has demonstrated that infants do learn about their language over the first several months ,particularly in terms of the language's sound structure. The first goal of the research proposed here is to assess what elements of language are learned by infants using general psychological learning mechanisms capitalizing on the speech infants hear around them. This will be done through computational modeling of corpora of speech to young children, and through perceptual experiments with infants. The second goal of the research is to create a procedure capable of assessing individual children's development of accurate memory for words. This procedure will then be used to investigate possible sources of variation between children in word learning, word representation, and efficiency in understanding speech. Longitudinal studies of one-year-old infants will examine the development of adult like forms of words, and why individual infants may differ in early language learning.
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0.958 |
2004 — 2010 |
Dahan, Delphine [⬀] Swingley, Daniel |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Temporal Dynamics of Phonological Expectations in Language Comprehension and Development @ University of Pennsylvania
Perception requires interpretation. The information provided by the senses is often incomplete, conflicting, and noisy; we understand the world by evaluating sensory data and weighting it more or less heavily according to specific biases. Many of these adaptive biases are learned through experience. For example, we perceive speech according to our knowledge of the language's sounds, words, and grammar, and according to what we think the speaker is likely to be saying. All this interpretive guesswork is necessary partly because as listeners, we try to understand someone's speech while they are still talking; and as speakers, we only enunciate when we think we have to. This research investigates the use of adaptive perceptual biases by closely monitoring people's interpretation of speech. The studies use eyetracking techniques in which listeners' visual fixations to sets of pictures reveal what listeners think sentences mean. For example, in evaluating a word, how important is the precise acoustic realization relative to the likelihood of a given word? The research also studies how biases in language are learned by infants and young children, who are surprisingly proficient interpreters of speech. These developmental studies examine how infants and toddlers can use what they have learned about language so far to help them learn and understand more.
The research promotes understanding of how linguistic information of several kinds is brought to bear on interpretation. Speech is inherently ambiguous. What strategies do our minds recruit in perception? Understanding how normal adults interpret speech helps in the design of intervention strategies for patients with compromised language, second-language learners, and the hard of hearing; understanding how infants and children make use of their knowledge of sound structure in language and their growing vocabularies yields a better understanding of language acquisition, early communicative deficits, and phonological bases of reading difficulty. In addition, the research uses phonological learning and interpretation as a test case for understanding the temporal dynamics of human interpretation at multiple time scales: in the moments when speech is being heard; while learning of specific probabilities or associations proceeds; and while the infant grows into an adult.
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1 |
2006 — 2017 |
Swingley, Daniel |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Contributions of Infant Learning to Language Acquisition @ University of Pennsylvania
[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During their first year, infants learn characteristics of the sound-pattern (phonology) of the language they hear around them. Infants also learn the forms of many words. The goal of the present research is to provide an empirically supported account of how the knowledge gained in infancy supports the language acquisition process. The proposed studies include perceptual experiments with infants and young children, acoustic measurements and annotation of infant-directed speech, and computational modeling of corpora of speech directed to infants. Several studies test children's perception of certain speech sound distinctions under varying conditions and children's learning of phonological information in new words. These studies take advantage of recent methodological advances in research on early word learning and speech perception, including eyetracking techniques. The computational modeling work uses what is known about infant perception to make estimates of infants' word-form knowledge in five languages. This word-form knowledge is a determinant of children's biases in how they find words in continuous speech, and contributes to early generalizations about the nature of words in the language. The effort to properly characterize young children's phonological knowledge and how it arises in infancy is relevant to the developmental timing of intervention for hearing deficits; it informs understanding of early receptive and productive vocabulary development; and it sheds light on current debates concerning the skills and mental representations that underlie successful performance in learning to read. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]
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1 |
2019 — 2022 |
Swingley, Daniel |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Learning Words and Speech Sounds in Infancy @ University of Pennsylvania
This project aims to discover how infants begin to learn words and speech sounds in the first year. When infants first hear speech, they do not know what parts of each sentence correspond to individual words. They probably do not even have the idea that words exist, but must discover it. This project uses what is known about infants' speech perception and memory to test what infants can learn from the speech signal. This will be done by making and annotating recordings of mothers at home speaking to their infants. The researchers will carefully measure the acoustics of words and speech sounds like consonants and vowels, and will use computer models to estimate what language information could be available to the naive infant. By linking together these estimates, and infants' language accomplishments (like vocabulary) as toddlers, it is possible to test how the maternal language environment provides for infant learning, and will permit discovery of what features make learning easiest for babies. The project will measure a diverse sample of mothers and children from Philadelphia and from elsewhere in the country. Understanding how language learning begins in young infants is important for understanding variability in young children's language related outcomes. It is also important for giving parents guidance about how to encourage language skill even in their very young children. Ultimately this will give us a better understanding of the beginnings of language development.
This project aims to discover how infants begin to learn words and speech sounds in the first year. In doing so the project will flesh out and challenge the proposal that infants learn speech sounds by learning the forms of words, contra the dominant view that infant phonetic learning is initially independent of the nascent lexicon. Central to the project is the de novo creation of a longitudinal corpus of infant-directed speech in African-American (AA) families, and the coordinated annotation of lexical and phonetic features in both this AA corpus and in the mainstream-English Seedlings corpus. The project will allow characterization, in unprecedented detail, of the consequences of specific maternal behaviors for specific learning outcomes in children, down to the individual word level. The research will evaluate the degree to which these relationships hold in both low and high SES families. The project will also use sensitive laboratory methods, including eye-tracking analysis of infants' fixation to named pictures, to evaluate the phonetic specificity of infants' early representations of words. The result will be a quantitatively specified characterization of how infants begin to learn how their language works.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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