We investigate the development of speech perception using different forms of synthetized speech that preserve only limited acoustic information of what is found in natural spoeech. Two frequently used forms of these stimuli are sine-wave speech, and amplitude-modulated speech; the former preserves frequency changes in a few narrow frequency bands whereas the latter retains only amplitude changes in a few broad frequency ranges within that of natural speech. The perception of these forms of speech involves certain forms of fast perceptual learning in adults and children. Our goal is to operationalize these phenomena in the form of different tasks with measurable performance. In turn we use such tasks to study the development of speech perception in kindergarteners and grade schoolers.  According to our results, performance in our speech perception tasks is correlated with that in standardized tests of language development. Our main objective in this project is to assess the diagnostic relevance of reduced speech stimuli (by involving subjects with atypical language development, in addition to typicals), and potentialy to develop training methods that promote phonologival processign in children.

We investigate (with Szabolcs Kiss, University of Pécs) preschoolers’ and young grade schoolers ability to combine their numerical knowledge with their mindreading ability. Our aim is to gain a better insight into how children combine specific types of concepts. We have studied kindergarteners’ and early grade scoolers’ in tasks involving perceptual perspective taking, false belief attribution, and numerical knowledge (counting and simple addition/subtraction). Compared to other cases of concept combination, we found that combining number concepts with those of metarepresentation is an unexpectedly difficult task for children in this age range. We are exploring the reasons for this difficulty, and attept to shed light on the nature of concept combination in the developing mind.