Communication Sciences & Disorders

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• Research Labs Main
• Auditory Research Lab
• Child and Adolescent Language Lab (CALL)
• Clinical Research in Neurogenic Communication Disorders Lab (CRNCS)
• Computational, Speech, Sensory, Development & Diseases Lab (CSD²)
• Hearing Aid Research Lab (HARL)
• Infant and Toddler Language Laboratory
• Neural Bases of Communication and Swallowing
• Psychoacoustic Research Lab
• Research Applications in Clinical Education (RACE)
• Sensory-Neural Engineering Research Laboratory
• Sign Language Research Lab
• Stuttering Research Laboratory
• Video Analysis Lab

Infant and Toddler Language Laboratory

Focus of Lab

The Infant and Toddler Language Laboratory focuses on infant and toddler speech perception and production. Current work concentrates on how the infant's own experience affects language learning. In much the same way that the onset of reaching will make concepts of distance more real to the infant, the onset of babbling should make adult speech more accessible to the infant. As the infant begins to concentrate on specific sounds, those sounds become more noticeable to the infant. In addition, as the infant begins to learn their first words, these words attain a special status in segmenting speech. The idea that the infant's own output and emerging lexicon have special status as input contains many benefits to processing a very complex quickly changing speech stream. By self-limiting what aspects of speech are analyzed the infant can actively simplify the learning process. In essence, through interacting with the world around them the infant is interactively creating the knowledge they need to become a competent language user.

Personnel

• Dr. Rory A. DePaolis, Director
• Holly Koegler, Graduate Assistant (Thesis)
• Sarah McKain, Graduate Assistant
• YK An, Graduate Assistant
• Caitlin Baird, ISAT Senior Project

Curent Projects

• The lab is funded by the Economic & Research Council of the United Kingdom to investigate the differences between the American and British infants word segmentation ability. This project involves speech perception tests and an analysis of speech directed to infants in the two cultures. The British portion of the study is at the University of York in England.
• Dr. DePaolis is funded by the Economic & Research Council of the United Kingdom to investigate the psychological reality of early phonological templates in toddlers. This is a cross-linguistic project examining early words forms of English, French, and Arabic learning toddlers to attempt to understand how they facilitate language development. This project is in collaboration with Drs. Marilyn Vihman and Tamar Keren-Portnoy at the Univestiy of York (England) , Dr. Ghada Khattab at Newcastle University (England), and Dr. Sophie Wauquier at the University of Paris 8 (France).
• New work in the lab is concentrating on how early manual and vocal activity co-develop in the transition into first word use. This project is in collaboration with Dr. Brenda Seal at Gallaudet University.
• New work is also concentrating on the role of visual cues in early language development. A new experimental paradigm is currently being tested to determine if hearing infants are sensitive to the difference between infants’ early and late signs in American Sign Language.