Professor of Psychology, Johns Hopkins
University
Ph. D., 1975 - University of Pennsylvania
Send email to jusczyk&jhu.edu
Peter Jusczyk is interested in the relation between speech perception capacities and language acquisition. He investigates the basic capacities that infants have for perceiving speech and studies the development of these capacities as a result of experience with a particular language. More specifically, Dr. Jusczyk is interested in the extent to which infants' speech perception capacities may help them in learning about the structure and organization of their native language. For example, can information in the speech signal provide infants with clues about the structure of sentences in the native language? When do infants begin to segment fluent speech into words, and what consequences does this have for learning how words can be ordered in sentences? When do infants begin to show some recognition of words?
Some of the research topics that Dr. Jusczyk is currently investigating include: How infants learn to find words in fluent speech. If you have ever heard someone speaking an unfamiliar language, you may begin to have some idea of the problem that the infant faces in listening to fluent speech. Speech in a foreign language often seems faster than speech in one's native language, and it is hard to tell where one word ends and another begins. How does the infant manage to cope with this problem? What information is there in speech that indicates the boundaries of words? How do infants learn which information to use for the language that they are learning? Do all infants begin in the same way, or do infants learning different languages use different routes to solve this problem?
When do infants begin to store information about the sound patterns of particular words? To speak and understand a language, one has to develop a vocabulary. This involves storing information not only about the meanings of words, but also about their sounds. A well-known finding in language acquisition is that when infants begin to speak, they often leave out function words (e.g., words like "the", "of", etc.). Does this mean that infants only store information about content words (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives)?
How does sensitivity to the prosodic features of language (i.e., its intonation, pitch, and rhythms) affect acquisition? In a number of studies, we have found that infants appear to be attuned to changes in prosodic properties that could potentially mark important grammatical units such as clauses and phrases. In listening to speech, do infants actually rely on these cues to process, encode, and remember the input?
Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Jusczyk, P. W., & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Infants' detection of sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 1-23.
Jusczyk, P. W., Friederici, A. D., Wessels, J., Svenkerud, V. Y., & Jusczyk, A. M. (1993). Infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of native language words. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 402-420.
Mandel, D. R., Jusczyk, P. W., & Pisoni, D. B. (1995). Infants' recognition of the sound patterns of their own names. Psychological Science, 6, 315-318.