Janet Feldman Werker

A leading figure in research on how human infants begin the process of acquiring their native language. Her 1984 article documented the time period during which infants initially can recognize speech contrasts from languages they have never heard, and then lose this ability as they become attuned to their native language. Developed the switch procedure-a new looking-time method-to assess how infants associate the sounds of words with their pictured referents and documented that infants are quite poor at noticing subtle sound differences in a referential context. Extended the statistical learning paradigm to studies of phonetic categories and showed that these categories can be rapidly altered by listening experience. Established that monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual infants show subtle differences in perception of speech categories and that vocal gestures and prenatal drugs affect speech perception in young infants. Review articles outline infants' remarkable language abilities and present innovative theories about language development.