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


External collaborators


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.