Suzanne Curtin

My core theoretical interest is in the interface between lexical development and infant speech perception. The goal of my research program is to understand how early speech perception and word learning contributes to the acquisition of a phonetically driven phonological system. I am interested in the nature of the infant’s initial state and how this influences the infant’s developing speech perception system. My research explores the role of early biases in directing attention to the necessary information in the speech signal that will enable the infant to bootstrap into language. I also examine infants’ sensitivity to distributional information in the speech input and explore how this information is used for parsing the continuous speech stream, and learning words. To this end, my research focuses on speech perception abilities in both typically and atypically developing infants with a special focus on infants who are at heightened risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research (ACCFCR)

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

National Science Foundation (NSF)

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Stephanie Archer (completed 2012) Postdoctoral Research Fellow McGill University

Christine Shea (completed 2010) Assistant Professor University of Iowa

Journals

Archer, S.L., Ference, J., & Curtin, S. (accepted). Now you hear it. 14-month-olds succeed at learning minimal pairs in stressed syllables. Journal of Cognition and Development.

Droucker, D., Curtin, S., & Vouloumanos, A. (in press). Linking Infant-Directed-Speech and Face Preferences to Language Outcomes in Infants at Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

MacKenzie, H., Curtin, S., & Graham, S.A. (in press). Class Matters: 12-month-olds’ word-object associations privilege content over function words. Developmental Science.

MacKenzie, H., Curtin, S., & Graham, S.A. (2012). 12-Month-Olds' Phonotactic Knowledge Guides Their Word-Object Mappings. Child Development, 83(4), 1129-1136.

Curtin, S., Campbell, J., & Hufnagle, D.G. (2012). Mapping novel labels to actions: How the rhythm of words guides infants’ learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112(2), 127-140.

Archer, S.L. & Curtin, S. (2011). Perceiving onset clusters in infancy. Infant Behavior and Development, 34(4),534-540.

Curtin, S., Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J.F. (2011). Bilingual beginnings as a lens for theory development. Special Issue of Journal of Phonetics, 39, 492-504.

Curtin, S. (2011). Do newly formed word representations encode non-criterial information? Journal of Child Language, 38(4), 904-917.

Mackenzie, H., Graham, S.A., & Curtin, S. (2011). 12-month-olds Privilege Words over Other Linguistic Sounds in an Associative Learning Task.  Developmental Science, 14(2), 399-410.

Shea, C. & Curtin, S. (2011). Experience, representations and the production of second language allophones. Second Language Research, 27, 229-250.

Shea, C., & Curtin, S. (2010). Discovering the relationship between context and allophones in a second language: Evidence for distribution-based learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(4), 581 -606.

Curtin, S. (2010). Young infants encode lexical stress in newly encountered words.  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105, 376-385.

Curtin, S. (2009). Twelve-month-olds learn word-object associations differing only in stress patterns. Journal of Child Language, 36, 1157-1165.

Curtin, S., Fennell, C., & Escudero, P. (2009). Weighting of acoustic cues explains patterns of word-object associative learning. Developmental Science. 12,725-731.

Curtin, S., Mintz, T.H., & Christiansen, M.H. (2005). Stress Changes the Representational Landscape: Evidence from Word Segmentation. Cognition, 96, 233-262.

Werker, J.F. & Curtin, S. (2005). PRIMIR: A Developmental Framework of Infant Speech Processing. Language Learning and Development, 1(2), 197-234.

Curtin, S., F.R. Manis and M.S. Seidenberg (2001). Parallels between the reading and spelling deficits of two subgroups of developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14: 515-547.

Christiansen, M.H. & Curtin, S.L. (1999). Transfer of learning: Rule acquisition or statistical learning? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 289-290.

Book Chapters

Curtin, S., & Hufnagle, D. G. (2008). Speech Perception, development. In Larry R. Squire, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, Academic Press, Oxford, 233-238.

Curtin, S., & Hufnagle, D.G. (2008). Prelinguistic speech perception. In Bavin, E. (Ed.), The Cambridge University Press Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 107-124.

Curtin, S. & Werker, J.F. (2007). Perceptual Foundations of Phonological Development. In M. Gareth Gaskell, G.T.M Altmann, P.Bloom, A. Caramazza and P. Levelt (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press.

Conference Proceedings

Hufnagle, D., & Curtin, S. (2007). Effects of phonetic cues to membership in function word categories in artificial languages. The Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Curtin, S., Fennell, C., & Escudero, P. (2007). Infants’ recognition of vowels in a word learning task. In H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatiklake, & I. Woo (eds), The 31st Proceeding of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, 141-152.

Shea, C., & Curtin, S. (2006). The Acquisition of L2 Positional Constraints by Adult Learners. Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA.

Shea, C. & Curtin. S. (2006). Learning allophones from the input, in David Bamman, Tatiana Magnitskaia and Colleen Zaller (eds.), Supplement for the Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development,Boston, MA.

• Courses