Word segmentation
Before infants begin to learn to talk or to understand spoken language,
they must first identify individual words from fluent speech.
To
accomplish this challenging task, they use information from a variety
of sources, including the phonotactics and stress pattern of their
language and distributional information about predictability between
syllables or phones in sentences. My collaborators and I use computational models
of
segmentation and artificial language experiments with adults to map the
mechanisms by which humans accomplish the task of segmentation.
Word learning
How do children
learn
the words of their native language? Our work investigates how the
task of word learning interacts with the task of
interpretation--figuring out what a speaker is saying. We use
computational models to combine cross-situational word learning--the
use of consistent associations between words and objects--with more
intentional types of word learning that draw on social cues like
eye-gaze, hand-position, pragmatics, and discourse cues.
Rule learning What regularities
can be extracted from sequentially-presented auditory stimuli, compared
with the regularities that humans and members of other species can
learn more generally? Understanding the resource and computation
constraints on learners in sequential situations can help us understand
the limitations on language learning for children acquiring their
native language. We use computational modeling and artificial language
experiments to investigate these questions.
Infant
social perception
How do very young infants see the world? Adults' attention is
drawn disproportionately to social aspects of the physical world--the
faces, bodies, and foci of attention of other agents. But do infants
have the same preferences? We use eye-tracking to examine how infants
perceive faces, bodies, and other objects and use computational tools
to characterize their eye-movements with the goal of understanding the
roots of social cognition in early infancy.
Language, culture, and cognition
What is the relationship between language and thought? We have studied
the cognition of the Pirahã, a tribe of indigenous people
living
in Amazonas, Brazil, with the goal of investigating some of the
surprising features of their language. For instance,
Pirahã is the first documented language which contains no
words
for numbers. In addition, we are investigating the syntactic
structure of Pirahã.
We have recently begun to use number words more broadly as a case study
of how cognition can be altered through learning a part of language. By
conducting studies of English-speakers under verbal interference (which
prevents them from counting) we are able to study the similarities and
differences between the way they accomplish numerical tasks and the
ways that Pirahã
do. We have also begun to study the ways that learning alternative
representational systems (like an abacus) can further alter the
perception and use of number.
