From speech perception to word learning and beyond

Abstract

From his undergraduate days at Brown, Peter Jusczyk revolutionized our understanding of the link between infant speech perception and language use. This talk reviews how Jusczyk’s work influenced my research in three important domains. The talk begins with a discussion of Jusczyk’s early work on infant speech perception, and illustrates how that led to my initial work on infant cross-language perception. This is followed by a discussion of Jusczyk’s work on sensitivity to probabilistic information and how this influenced the more recent work [Maye, Werker, and Gerken] on the mechanisms underlying changes in phonetic perception. The third research section briefly describes how Jusczyk’s work on word segmentation influenced ongoing research in the laboratory on early word learning. In the final few minutes of the talk, an attempt will be made to give a sense of the enormous influence Peter Jusczyk’s work had, and continues to have, on our field.