HESP Seminar Series: Giovanna Morini (U of Delaware)

Extracting meaning from auditory signals: A look at how children process variation in language

Abstract: Listeners regularly encounter a great deal of variability in the language surrounding them. This variation can come from talkers who produce words differently (such as speakers from diverse dialects), from exposure to input that contains different languages (such as language-mixing in bilinguals), or from hearing speech presented in less than optimal listening conditions (for example, daycares and classrooms where there are high noise levels). These situations require the listener to rely on a variety of cognitive and linguistic skills in order to successfully understand the message being conveyed. The listener must sort through information associated with the speech signal and focus on the relevant portions of the message. How is it that we are able to do this? Could factors such as age, language experience (e.g., growing up bilingual), and hearing abilities (e.g., being born deaf or hard-of-hearing - DHH) influence the development of skills needed for listeners to process language variation? I will introduce different lines of work that investigate these questions. This includes data from both monolingual and bilingual children who are in the early stages of languages acquisition, as well as an overview of a project that expands this topic to the study of DHH infants.