Research in Language Acquisition
- Activities
- Staff members
- PhD students
- External collaborators
- Selected publications
Activities
Valerie Hazan's research is concerned with the development of speech
perception. In a recent MRC-funded project, she and Sarah Barrett evaluated
the development of phonemic categorisation in normally-hearing children
aged 6 to 12. This work showed that speech perceptual development is a slow
and gradual process as categorisation was not yet adult-like by age 12
(Hazan and Barrett, 2000). This work therefore has important implications
for models of speech perception development which have mainly focused until
now on the early stages of acquisition. In current work, funded by the
Wellcome Trust, Valerie Hazan and Duncan Markham are investigating the
development of speaker normalisation in normally-hearing children.
Paul Iverson's research examines the development of phonetic perception
during the first year of life. One major finding has been that infants are
not born with an innate ability to discriminate English /r/ and /l/
phonemes; perceptual abilities become tuned to this phonetic contrast as
infants are exposed to English. This work is continuing in collaboration
with Patricia K. Kuhl (University of Washington).
Neil Smith has done extensive work over the last decade on the polyglot savant Christopher (see Smith & Tsimpli, 1995, and about a dozen articles). This work is continuing in collaboration with Ianthi Tsimpli (Cambridge University and the University of Thessaloniki) and Gary Morgan and Bencie Woll (City University) (see Morgan et al (in press)). Neil Smith also teaches a course devoted to a different aspect of (mainly first) language acquisition each year.
Staff members
PhD students
- Ann Law
Acquisition of sentence final particles in Cantonese
Email:
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Alex Perovic
Acquisition of syntax in pathological cases, esp Downs syndrome
Email:
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Marco Tamburelli
Transfer in bilingual acquisition
Email:
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Vina Tsakali
Acquisition of clitics in Modern Greek
Email:
External collaborators
- Sarah Barrett (City University)
- Patricia K. Kuhl (University of Washington)
- Gary Morgan (City University)
- Ianthi Tsimpli (Cambridge University and the University of Thessaloniki)
- Bencie Woll (City University)
Selected publications
Several of the publications below and many others may be downloaded from the web pages of the relevant staff members. We also have a searchable database of staff publications.
Hazan, V. and Barrett, S. (2000) 'The development of phonemic
categorisation in children aged 6 to 12', Journal of Phonetics 28, pp. 377-396.
Morgan, G., N. Smith, I.-M. Tsimpli & B. Woll (in press)'Language against
the odds: The learning of British Sign Language by a polyglot savant',
Journal of Linguistics.
Smith, N. & I.-M. Tsimpli (1995) The Mind of a Savant. Oxford, Blackwell.