LouAnn Gerken

Interests

Research

I study how infants and toddlers learn language, and more generally, how they discover sequential patterns (e.g., language, music) in their environment.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Gerken, L. -. (2009). Language development. Plural.
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  ;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2009). Language Development. San Diego, Plural Publishing.;

Chapters

• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2015). Grammar learning as model building. In Current Trends in Statistical Approaches to Language Acquisition. Taylor Francis.
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  ;Your Role: I was invited to write the chapter. Dawson wrote a section.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Fryberg, S. A., & Gerken, L. A. (2012). Twins separated at birth? Critical moments in cross-race mentoring relationships. In Why we can’t “just get along”: Women of color and white women in the academy.
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  ;Your Role: Fryberg was invited to contribute a chapter and asked me to join, since I'd been her faculty mentor. We contributed roughly equally.;Full Citation: Fryberg, S. & Gerken, L. A. (2012) Twins separated at birth? Critical moments in cross-race mentoring relationships. In K. L. Dace (editor), Unlikely Allies in the Academy: Women of Color and White Women in Conversation. Taylor and Francis. (Book won Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012).;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2012). Can rational models be good accounts of developmental change? The case of language development at two time scales. In Rational constructivism in cognitive development.
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  ;Your Role: I started out as the first author but needed to hand it off to Dawson in the final version.;Full Citation: Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. A. (2012). Can rational models be good accounts of developmental change? The case of language development at two time scales. In F. Xu & T. Kushnir (Eds.), Rational constructivism in cognitive development: Elsevier publishing.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., , A. C., & , A. S. (2011). Young infants learn sound patterns involving unnatural sound classes. Penn working papers in linguistics.
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  ;Your Role: The collaboration began from a disagreement about how to interpret some research from the Purdue lab. My contribution was largely conceptual;Full Citation: CristiĂ , A., Seidl, A., & Gerken, L. A. (2011). Young infants learn sound patterns involving unnatural sound classes. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 17(1), Article 9.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Seidl is an associate professor at Purdue and Cristia was her Ph.D. student at the time the research was begun;
• Gerken, L. -., & Balcomb, F. (2010). Three observations about infant generalization and their implications for generalization mechanisms. In Generalization of knowledge: Multidisciplinary perspectives. Psychology Press.
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  ;Your Role: I wrote most of the chapter, and Balcomb contributed to one section.;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A., & Balcomb, F. K. (2010). Three observations about infant generalization and their implications for generalization mechanisms. In M. T. Banich & D. Caccamise (Eds.), Generalization of knowledge: Multidisciplinary perspectives. (pp. 73-88). New York, NY US: Psychology Press.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Balcomb was a graduate student but we wrote the chapter while she was a post doc at Temple.;
• Gerken, L. -., Richtsmeier, P., & Ohala, D. (2009). Induction of phonotactics from word-types and word-tokens. In Proceedings of the 33rd Boston University Conference on Language Development. Cascadilla Press.
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  ;Your Role: As noted in the previous entry, this line of research was begun by me and Lisa Goffman. Peter Richtsmeier took it over for his dissertation, which was co-advised by Diane Ohala and me. I helped design the research and edited the ms. several times.;Full Citation: Richtsmeier, P. T., Gerken, L. A., & Ohala, D. K. (2009). Induction of phonotactics from word-types and word-tokens. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord & M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Wilson, R., GĂłmez, R., & Nurmsoo, E. (2009). The relation between linguistic analogies and lexical categories. In Analogy in grammar: Form and acquisition. Oxford University Press.
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  ;Your Role: The chapter was invited after a workshop in Leipzig. I wrote the ms., but the research reported was carried out in my lab in collaboration over many years with the co-authors.;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A., Wilson, R., Gomez, R., & Nurmsoo, E. (2009). The relation between linguistic analogies and lexical categories. In J. P. Blevins & J. Blevins (Eds.), Analogy in grammar: Form and acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -. (2008). Are infants constrained in their linguistic generalizations? Some theoretical and methodological observations. In Infant pathways to language.
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  ;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2008). Are infants constrained in their linguistic generalizations? Some theoretical and methodological observations. In J. Colombo, P. McCardle & L. Freund (Eds.), Infant pathways to language. New York: Talylor Francis.;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007). Acquiring linguistic structure. In Blackwell handbook of language development.
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  ;Your Role: invited author;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2007). Acquiring linguistic structure. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (eds.) Blackwell handbook of language development. (pp. 173-190). Malden, MA, US: Blackwell Publishing.;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007). Exploring the basis for generalization in language acquisition. In Labratory Phonology 9: Change in Phonology.
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  ;Your Role: author of approx. 2/3 of the chapter;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A., & Zamuner, T. (2007). Exploring the basis for generalization in language acquisition. In J. Cole & J. Hualde (eds.), Labratory Phonology 9: Change in Phonology (pp. 265-286). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: I was invited to give a paper which was the basis of the chapter. I asked former graduate student, Tania Zamuner, to be a co-author.;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006). Language in infancy. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
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  ;Your Role: sole author;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2006). Language in infancy. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2. Elsevier.;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005). Language in infancy. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
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  Gerken, L. A. (in press). Language in infancy. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2. Elsevier.;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005). What develops in language development?. In Advances in Child Development and Behavior.. Elsevier.
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  ;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2005). What develops in language development? In R. Kail (ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior. Elsevier.;
• Ohala, D. K., & Gerken, L. (2000). Language production in children. In Aspects of Language Production (Studies in Cognition). Psychology Press.

Journals/Publications

• Gerken, L., Plante, E., & Goffman, L. (2021). Not all procedural learning tasks are difficult for adults with developmental language disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
• Gerken, L., Quam, C., Clough, L., & Knight, S. (2021). Infants' discrimination of consonant contrasts in the presence and absence of talker variability. Infancy, 26(1), 84–103. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12371
• Goffman, L., & Gerken, L. (2020). An alternative to the procedural∼declarative memory account of developmental language disorder. Journal of communication disorders, 83, 105946.
• Gervain, J., de la Cruz-Pavía, I., & Gerken, L. (2020). Behavioral and Imaging Studies of Infant Artificial Grammar Learning. Topics in cognitive science, 12(3), 815-827.
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  Artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigms have proven to be productive and useful to investigate how young infants break into the grammar of their native language(s). The question of when infants first show the ability to learn abstract grammatical rules has been central to theoretical debates about the innate vs. learned nature of grammar. The presence of this ability early in development, that is, before considerable experience with language, has been argued to provide evidence for a biologically endowed ability to acquire language. Artificial grammar learning tasks also allow infant populations to be readily compared with adults and non-human animals. Artificial grammar learning paradigms with infants have been used to investigate a number of linguistic phenomena and learning tasks, from word segmentation to phonotactics and morphosyntax. In this review, we focus on AGL studies testing infants' ability to learn grammatical/structural properties of language. Specifically, we discuss the results of AGL studies focusing on repetition-based regularities, the categorization of functors, adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies, and word order. We discuss the implications of the results for a general theory of language acquisition, and we outline some of the open questions and challenges.
• Figueroa, M., & Gerken, L. (2019). Experience with morphosyntactic paradigms allows toddlers to tacitly anticipate overregularized verb forms months before they produce them. Cognition, 191, 103977.
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  When do children acquire abstract grammatical categories? Studies of 2- to 3-year-olds' productions of complete morphosyntactic paradigms (e.g., all legal determiners with all nouns) suggest relatively later category acquisition, while studies of infant discrimination of grammatical vs. ungrammatical sequences suggest earlier acquisition. However, few of the latter studies have probed category generalization by examining how learners treat gaps in their input, and none have found evidence that learners before the age of 2 years fill gaps in verb paradigms. Therefore, the three experiments presented here asked whether 16-month-olds tacitly expect to hear forms like breaked by presenting them with overregularized verbs vs. (1) nonce verbs + -ed, (2) real English nouns + -ed, and (3) the correct irregular counterparts. The pattern of listening preferences suggests that toddlers anticipate overregularized forms, suggesting that they have a general proto-category verb, to which they expect the complete set of verb inflections to apply.
• Gerken, L., Quam, C., & Goffman, L. (2019). Adults fail to learn a type of linguistic pattern that is readily learned by infants.. Language Learning and Development, 15(4), 279–294.
• Gerken, L. (2018). Some considerations for adding reference back into early language development. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(4), 742-746.
• Gonzales, K., Gerken, L., & Gómez, R. L. (2018). How who is talking matters as much as what they say to infant language learners. Cognitive psychology, 106, 1-20.
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  Human vocalizations contain both voice characteristics that convey who is talking and sophisticated linguistic structure. Inter-talker variation in voice characteristics is traditionally seen as posing a challenge for infant language learners, who must disregard this variation when the task is to detect talkers' shared linguistic conventions. However, talkers often differ markedly in their pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. This is true even in monolingual environments, given factors like gender, dialect, and proficiency. We therefore asked whether infants treat the voice characteristics distinguishing talkers as a cue for learning linguistic conventions that one talker may follow more closely than another. Supporting this previously untested hypothesis, 12-month-olds did not freely combine two talkers' sentences distinguished by voice to more robustly learn the talkers' shared grammar rules. Rather, they used this voice information to learn rules to which only one talker adhered, a finding replicated in same-aged infants with greater second language exposure. Both language groups generalized the rules to novel sentences produced by a novel talker. Voice characteristics can thus help infants learn and generalize talker-dependent linguistic structure, which pervades natural language. Results are interpreted in light of theories linking language learning with voice perception.
• Gerken, L., & Quam, C. M. (2017). Infant Learning is Influenced by Local Spurious Generalizations. Developmental Science.
• Quam, C., Knight, S., & Gerken, L. (2017). The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants’ Word Learning. Studies in Laboratory Phonology.
• Hawthorne, K., Gerken, L., & Rudat, L. (2016). Prosody as a cue to hierarchical structure for toddlers and adults. Infancy.
• Gerken, L., & Knight, S. (2015). Infants generalize from just (the right) four words. Cognition, 143, 187-92.
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  Infants in the lab can generalize from 2min of language-like input. Given that infants might fail to fully encode so much input, how many examples do they actually need? And if infants only encode a subset of their input at one time, does generalization change when that subset supports multiple generalizations? Exp. 1 asked whether 11-month-olds generalize the relation between two consonants in a word when just four input words provided non-conflicting vs. partially conflicting support for a phonological feature-based generalization. Infants learned under both conditions, although the latter appears to be more difficult. Exp. 2 asked whether infants' robust learning reflects a bias toward feature-based generalizations. Infants failed to generalize when input provided completely conflicting support for two generalizations. Together, the data suggest that infants are able to generalize from much less input than previously observed, but generalization depends on the specific subset of the input they encounter.
• Gonzales, K., Gerken, L., & Gomez, R. L. (2015). Does hearing dialects at different times help infants learn dialect-specific rules?. Cognition.
• Gonzales, K., Gerken, L., & Gómez, R. L. (2015). Does hearing two dialects at different times help infants learn dialect-specific rules?. Cognition, 140, 60-71.
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  Infants might be better at teasing apart dialects with different language rules when hearing the dialects at different times, since language learners do not always combine input heard at different times. However, no previous research has independently varied the temporal distribution of conflicting language input. Twelve-month-olds heard two artificial language streams representing different dialects-a "pure stream" whose sentences adhered to abstract grammar rules like aX bY, and a "mixed stream" wherein any a- or b-word could precede any X- or Y-word. Infants were then tested for generalization of the pure stream's rules to novel sentences. Supporting our hypothesis, infants showed generalization when the two streams' sentences alternated in minutes-long intervals without any perceptually salient change across streams (Experiment 2), but not when all sentences from these same streams were randomly interleaved (Experiment 3). Results are interpreted in light of temporal context effects in word learning.
• Hawthorne, K., Mazuka, R., & Gerken, L. (2015). The acoustic salience of prosody trumps infants' acquired knowledge of language-specific prosodic patterns. Journal of memory and language, 82, 105-117.
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  There is mounting evidence that prosody facilitates grouping the speech stream into syntactically-relevant units (e.g., Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Soderstrom, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2005). We ask whether prosody's role in syntax acquisition relates to its general acoustic salience or to the learner's acquired knowledge of correlations between prosody and syntax in her native language. English- and Japanese-acquiring 19-month-olds listened to sentences from an artificial grammar with non-native prosody (Japanese or English, respectively), then were tested on their ability to recognize prosodically-marked constituents when the constituents had moved to a new position in the sentence. Both groups were able to use non-native prosody to parse speech into cohesive, reorderable, syntactic constituent-like units. Comparison with Hawthorne & Gerken (2014), in which English-acquiring infants were tested on sentences with English prosody, suggests that 19-month-olds are equally adept at using native and non-native prosody for at least some types of learning tasks and, therefore, that prosody is useful in early syntactic segmentation because of its acoustic salience.
• Gerken, L., Dawson, C., Chatila, R., & Tenenbaum, J. (2014). Surprise! Infants consider possible bases of generalization for a single input example. Developmental Science.
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  Abstract: Infants have been shown to generalize from a small number of input examples. However, existing studies allow two possible means of generalization. One is via a process of noting similarities shared by several examples. Alternatively, generalization may reflect an implicit desire to explain the input. The latter view suggests that generalization might occur when even a single input example is surprising, given the learner's current model of the domain. To test the possibility that infants are able to generalize based on a single example, we familiarized 9-month-olds with a single three-syllable input example that contained either one surprising feature (syllable repetition, Experiment 1) or two features (repetition and a rare syllable, Experiment 2). In both experiments, infants generalized only to new strings that maintained all of the surprising features from familiarization. This research suggests that surprise can promote very rapid generalization. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
• Hawthorne, K., & Gerken, L. (2014). From pauses to clauses: prosody facilitates learning of syntactic constituency. Cognition, 133(2), 420-8.
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  Learning to parse the speech stream into syntactic constituents is a crucial prerequisite to adult-like sentence comprehension, and prosody is one source of information that could be used for this task. To test the role of prosody in facilitating constituent learning, 19-month-olds were familiarized with non-word sentences with 1-clause (ABCDEF) or 2-clause (ABC, DEF) prosody and were then tested on sentences that represent a grammatical (DEF, ABC) or ungrammatical (EFA, BCD) 'movement' of the clauses from the 2-clause familiarization sentences. If infants in the 2-clause group are able to use prosody to group words into cohesive chunks, they should discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical movements in the test items, even though the test sentences have a new prosodic contour. The 1-clause, control, group should not discriminate. Results support these predictions and suggest that infants treat prosodically-grouped words as more cohesive and constituent-like than words that straddle a prosodic boundary. A follow-up experiment suggests that these results do not merely reflect recognition of words in boundary positions or acoustic similarity of words across the familiarization and test phases.
• Gerken, L., Gerken, L. -., Plante, E., Vance, R., & Moody, A. (2013). What Influences Children's Conceptualizations of Language Input?. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.
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  PURPOSE: Children learning language conceptualize the nature of input they receive in ways that allow them to understand and construct utterances they have never heard before. This study was designed to illuminate the types of information children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) focus on to develop their conceptualizations and whether they can rapidly shift their initial conceptualizations if provided with additional input. METHOD: In two studies, preschool children with and without SLI were exposed to an artificial language, the characteristics of which allowed for various types of conceptualizations about its fundamental properties. After being familiarized with the language, children were asked to judge test strings that conformed to the input in one of four different ways. RESULTS: All children preferred test items that reflected a narrow conceptualization of the input (i.e., items most like those heard during familiarization). Children showed a strong preference for phonology as a defining property of the artificial language. Restructuring the input to the child could induce them to also track word order information as well. CONCLUSIONS: Children tend towards narrow conceptualizations of language input, but the nature of their conceptualizations can be influenced by the nature of the input they receive.
• Dawson, C. R., & Gerken, L. (2012). Can rational models be good accounts of developmental change? The case of language development at two time scales. Advances in child development and behavior, 43, 95-124.
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  Rational models of human perception and cognition have allowed researchers new ways to look at learning and the ability to make inferences from data. But how good are such models at accounting for developmental change? In this chapter, we address this question in the domain of language development, focusing on the speed with which developmental change takes place, and classifying different types of language development as either fast or slow. From the pattern of fast and slow development observed, we hypothesize that rational learning processes are generally well suited for handling fast processes over small amounts of input data. In contrast, we suggest that associative learning processes are generally better suited to slow development, in which learners accumulate information about what is typical of their language over time. Finally, although one system may be dominant for a particular component of language learning, we speculate that both systems frequently interact, with the associative system providing a source of emergent hypotheses to be evaluated by the rational system and the rational system serving to highlight which aspects of the learner's input need to be processed in greater depth by the associative system.
• Lindsey, B. A., & Gerken, L. (2012). The role of morphophonological regularity in young Spanish-speaking children's production of gendered noun phrases. Journal of Child Language, 39(4), 753-776.
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  PMID: 22182597;Abstract: Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form (la noun-a and el noun-o). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of determiner and noun forms, or whether they initially learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one. Spanish-English bilingual children and adults repeated Spanish words and non-words preceded by gender congruous and incongruous determiners. If children learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one, they should show a gender congruity effect only for words. In contrast with this prediction, both children and adults demonstrated congruity effects for words and non-words, indicating sensitivity to correlated morphophonological forms. Furthermore, both age groups showed more facility in producing phrases with nouns ending in -a, which are more frequent and predictable from the preceding determiner. © 2011 Copyright Cambridge University Press.
• Lindsey, B. A., & Gerken, L. (2012). The role of morphophonological regularity in young Spanish-speaking children's production of gendered noun phrases. Journal of child language, 39(4), 753-76.
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  Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form (la noun-a and el noun-o). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of determiner and noun forms, or whether they initially learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one. Spanish-English bilingual children and adults repeated Spanish words and non-words preceded by gender congruous and incongruous determiners. If children learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one, they should show a gender congruity effect only for words. In contrast with this prediction, both children and adults demonstrated congruity effects for words and non-words, indicating sensitivity to correlated morphophonological forms. Furthermore, both age groups showed more facility in producing phrases with nouns ending in -a, which are more frequent and predictable from the preceding determiner.
• Newman-Smith, K., Yourison, R., Gerken, L. A., Bootzin, R., Nadel, L., & Gomez, R. (2012). State of rest in 17-month old infants differentially affects attention to new information. SLEEP, 35, A96-A96.
• Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. (2011). When global structure " Explains Away" local grammar: A Bayesian account of rule-induction in tone sequences. Cognition, 120(3), 350-359.
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  PMID: 21257161;Abstract: While many constraints on learning must be relatively experience-independent, past experience provides a rich source of guidance for subsequent learning. Discovering structure in some domain can inform a learner's future hypotheses about that domain. If a general property accounts for particular sub-patterns, a rational learner should not stipulate separate explanations for each detail without additional evidence, as the general structure has " explained away" the original evidence. In a grammar-learning experiment using tone sequences, manipulating learners' prior exposure to a tone environment affects their sensitivity to the grammar-defining feature, in this case consecutive repeated tones. Grammar-learning performance is worse if context melodies are " smooth" - when small intervals occur more than large ones - as Smoothness is a general property accounting for a high rate of repetition. We present an idealized Bayesian model as a " best case" benchmark for learning repetition grammars. When context melodies are Smooth, the model places greater weight on the small-interval constraint, and does not learn the repetition rule as well as when context melodies are not Smooth, paralleling the human learners. These findings support an account of abstract grammar-induction in which learners rationally assess the statistical evidence for underlying structure based on a generative model of the environment. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. R. (2011). When global structure. Cognition.
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  ;Your Role: helped design research and did some writing;Full Citation: Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. A. (2011). When global structure "explains away" evidence for local grammar: A Bayesian account of rule induction in tone sequences. Cognition, 120(3), 350-359.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Balcomb, F., & Minton, J. (2011). Infants avoid “laboring in vain” by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns. Developmental Science.
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  ;Your Role: I designed the study and did most of the writing;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A., Balcomb, F. K., & Minton, J. (2011). Infants avoid “laboring in vain” by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns. Developmental Science, 14(5), 972-979.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Balcomb is former Ph.D. student, Minton is former lab manager;
• Gerken, L. -., Plante, E., Bahl, M., & Vance, B. (2011). Beyond phonotactic frequency: Presentation frequency effects word productions in specific language impairment. Journal of Communication Disorders.
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  ;Your Role: I designed the original study with normally developing children;Full Citation: Plante, E., Bahl, M., Vance, R., & Gerken, L. A. (2011). Beyond phonotactic frequency: Presentation frequency effects word productions in specific language impairment. Journal of Communication Disorders, 44, 91-102.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member at UA: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Vance is Plante's lab manager;
• Gerken, L. -., Richtsmeier, P., & Ohala, D. (2011). Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations. Journal of Child Language.
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  ;Full Citation: Richtsmeier, P. T., Gerken, L. A., & Ohala, D. K. (2011). Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations. Journal of Child Language.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;
• Gerken, L., Balcomb, F. K., & Minton, J. L. (2011). Infants avoid 'labouring in vain' by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns. Developmental Science, 14(5), 972-979.
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  PMID: 21884313;Abstract: Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect spurious patterns, and attempting to learn the latter costs time and resources with no advantage to the learner. Thus, an efficient learner in a complex environment needs to devote more attention to input that reflects a real and learnable pattern than to input that reflects a spurious or ultimately unlearnable pattern. However, in order to achieve such efficiency in the absence of external feedback, learners need to have an implicit metric of their own learning progress. Do human infants have such a metric? Data from two experiments demonstrate that 17-month-olds attend longer to learnable vs. unlearnable linguistic grammars, taking more trials to habituate and more overall time to habituate for grammars in which a valid generalization over input stimuli can be made. These data provide the first evidence that infants have an implicit metric of their own learning progress and preferentially direct their attention to learnable aspects of their environment. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
• Gerken, L., Balcomb, F. K., & Minton, J. L. (2011). Infants avoid 'labouring in vain' by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns. Developmental science, 14(5), 972-9.
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  Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect spurious patterns, and attempting to learn the latter costs time and resources with no advantage to the learner. Thus, an efficient learner in a complex environment needs to devote more attention to input that reflects a real and learnable pattern than to input that reflects a spurious or ultimately unlearnable pattern. However, in order to achieve such efficiency in the absence of external feedback, learners need to have an implicit metric of their own learning progress. Do human infants have such a metric? Data from two experiments demonstrate that 17-month-olds attend longer to learnable vs. unlearnable linguistic grammars, taking more trials to habituate and more overall time to habituate for grammars in which a valid generalization over input stimuli can be made. These data provide the first evidence that infants have an implicit metric of their own learning progress and preferentially direct their attention to learnable aspects of their environment.
• Gerken, L., Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. -. (2011). When global structure "Explains Away" local grammar: a Bayesian account of rule-induction in tone sequences. Cognition, 120(3).
  More info

  While many constraints on learning must be relatively experience-independent, past experience provides a rich source of guidance for subsequent learning. Discovering structure in some domain can inform a learner's future hypotheses about that domain. If a general property accounts for particular sub-patterns, a rational learner should not stipulate separate explanations for each detail without additional evidence, as the general structure has "explained away" the original evidence. In a grammar-learning experiment using tone sequences, manipulating learners' prior exposure to a tone environment affects their sensitivity to the grammar-defining feature, in this case consecutive repeated tones. Grammar-learning performance is worse if context melodies are "smooth" -- when small intervals occur more than large ones -- as Smoothness is a general property accounting for a high rate of repetition. We present an idealized Bayesian model as a "best case" benchmark for learning repetition grammars. When context melodies are Smooth, the model places greater weight on the small-interval constraint, and does not learn the repetition rule as well as when context melodies are not Smooth, paralleling the human learners. These findings support an account of abstract grammar-induction in which learners rationally assess the statistical evidence for underlying structure based on a generative model of the environment.
• Gerken, L., Gerken, L. -., Plante, E., Bahl, M., & Vance, R. (2011). Beyond phonotactic frequency: presentation frequency effects word productions in specific language impairment. Journal of communication disorders, 44(1).
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  Phonotactic frequency effects on word production are thought to reflect accumulated experience with a language. Here we demonstrate that frequency effects can also be obtained through short-term manipulations of the input to children. We presented children with nonwords in an experiment that systematically manipulated English phonotactic frequency and the frequency of presentation within the experiment. Both of these manipulations affected the accuracy and time-to-response for nonword production both for typically developing and children with specific language impairment. Children with SLI were less accurate in their productions overall, but still exhibited an effect of the short-term frequency manipulation. Children with SLI differed significantly from their typical peers in terms of time-to-response only when both English and Experimental frequency were low. The results indicate that simple manipulations of the input can affect children's representation of word forms, and this can facilitate word production without the need for long term exposure or articulatory practice.
• Richtsmeier, P., Gerken, L., & Ohala, D. (2011). Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations. Journal of child language, 38(5), 951-78.
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  The experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language properties, token and type frequency, as they contribute to phonotactic learning. Token frequency is the raw number of exposures children have to a particular pattern; type frequency refers to a count of abstract entities, such as unique words. Our results suggest that children's production accuracy is most sensitive to a combination of type and token frequency: children were able to generalize a target phonotactic sequence to a new word when familiarized with multiple word-types across tokens from multiple talkers, but not when presented with either word-types with no talker variability or multiple talker-tokens of a single word.
• Richtsmeier, P., Gerken, L., & Ohala, D. (2011). Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations.. Journal of child language, 38(5), 951-978.
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  PMID: 21126387;Abstract: The experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language properties, token and type frequency, as they contribute to phonotactic learning. Token frequency is the raw number of exposures children have to a particular pattern; type frequency refers to a count of abstract entities, such as unique words. Our results suggest that children's production accuracy is most sensitive to a combination of type and token frequency: children were able to generalize a target phonotactic sequence to a new word when familiarized with multiple word-types across tokens from multiple talkers, but not when presented with either word-types with no talker variability or multiple talker-tokens of a single word.
• Gerken, L. (2010). Infants use rational decision criteria for choosing among models of their input. Cognition, 115(2), 362-366.
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  PMID: 20144828;PMCID: PMC2835817;Abstract: Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AAdi or AdiA) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the narrower one should allow a rational learner to select the broader generalization. The current experiment asked whether infants show evidence of being such learners. Infants who heard the stimuli that previously led to the narrower generalization plus three counterexamples mixed into the last five stimuli made the broader generalization at test. A control condition ruled out the possibility that infants based their generalization on the last five familiarization stimuli. The new findings suggest that infants effectively consider multiple competing models for their input and use rational decision criteria for selecting among these models. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
• Gerken, L. -. (2010). Infants use rational decision criteria for choosing among models of their input. Cognition.
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  ;Your Role: I designed the research and wrote the article.;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2010). Infants use rational decision criteria for choosing among models of their input. Cognition, 115(2), 362-366.;
• Gerken, L. -., Plante, B., & Vance, . (2010). Children with specific language impairment show rapid, implicit learning of stress assignment rules. Journal of Communication Disorders.
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  ;Your Role: The research was based on earlier research that I developed.;Full Citation: Plante, E., Bahl, M., Vance, R., & Gerken, L. A. (2010). Children with specific language impairment show rapid, implicit learning of stress assignment rules. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43(5), 397-406.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member at UA: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Vance is Plante's lab manager;
• Gerken, L., & Gerken, L. -. (2010). Infants use rational decision criteria for choosing among models of their input. Cognition, 115(2).
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  Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AAdi or AdiA) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the narrower one should allow a rational learner to select the broader generalization. The current experiment asked whether infants show evidence of being such learners. Infants who heard the stimuli that previously led to the narrower generalization plus three counterexamples mixed into the last five stimuli made the broader generalization at test. A control condition ruled out the possibility that infants based their generalization on the last five familiarization stimuli. The new findings suggest that infants effectively consider multiple competing models for their input and use rational decision criteria for selecting among these models.
• Gerken, L., Gerken, L. -., Plante, E., Bahl, M., & Vance, R. (2010). Children with specific language impairment show rapid, implicit learning of stress assignment rules. Journal of communication disorders, 43(5).
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  An implicit learning paradigm was used to assess children's sensitivity to syllable stress information in an artificial language. Study 1 demonstrated that preschool children, with and without specific language impairment (SLI), can generalize patterns of stress heard during a brief period of familiarization, and can also abstract underlying ordered rules by which stress patterns were assigned to syllables. In Study 2, the salience of stressed elements was acoustically enhanced. Counter to expectations, there was no evidence of learning with this manipulation for either the typically developing children or children with SLI. The results suggest that children with SLI and their typically developing peers are sensitive to syllable stress cues to language structure. However, attempts to draw attention to these patterns by making them more salient may prompt children to use alternate learning strategies that do not lead to an implicit understanding of how stress contributes to the structure of language. Learning outcomes: The reader will be able to understand: (1) that children with SLI can learn and generalize the rules for assigning word-level stress patterns within minutes of hearing examples, but (2) strategies to enhance learning may actually have the opposite effect for these children.
• RICHTSMEIER, P., GERKEN, L., & OHALA, D. (2010). Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations. Journal of Child Language, 1-28.
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  Abstract: ABSTRACTThe experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language properties, token and type frequency, as they contribute to phonotactic learning. Token frequency is the raw number of exposures children have to a particular pattern; type frequency refers to a count of abstract entities, such as unique words. Our results suggest that children's production accuracy is most sensitive to a combination of type and token frequency: children were able to generalize a target phonotactic sequence to a new word when familiarized with multiple word-types across tokens from multiple talkers, but not when presented with either word-types with no talker variability or multiple talker-tokens of a single word.
• Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. (2009). From domain-generality to domain-sensitivity: 4-Month-olds learn an abstract repetition rule in music that 7-month-olds do not. Cognition, 111(3), 378-382.
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  PMID: 19338982;PMCID: PMC2680471;Abstract: Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining generalizations. In two experiments, 4-month-old and 7-month-old infants were familiarized with sequences of musical chords or tones adhering either to an AAB pattern or an ABA pattern. In both cases, the 4-month-olds learned the generalization, but the 7-month-olds did not. The success of the 4-month-olds appears to contradict an account that this type of pattern learning is the provenance of a language-specific rule-learning module. It is not yet clear what drives the age-related change, but plausible candidates include differential experience with language and music, as well as interactions between general cognitive development and stimulus complexity. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2009). Learning to learn differently: The emergence of domain-sensitive generalization in the second six months of life. Cognition.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the research and write the ms.;Full Citation: Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. A. (2009). Learning to learn differently: The emergence of domain-sensitive generalization in the second six months of life. Cognition, 111, 378-382.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Bahl, M., & Plante, E. (2009). Processing prosodic structure by adults with language-based learning disability. Journal of Communication Disorders.
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  ;Your Role: The research was based on previous work of mine. I edited the ms. several times and consulted about methods;Full Citation: Bahl, M., Plante, E., & Gerken, L. (2009). Processing prosodic structure by adults with language-based learning disability. Journal of Communication Disorders, 42(5), 313-323.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member at UA: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Richtsmeier, P., Goffman, L., & Hogan, T. (2009). Statistical frequency in perception affects children's lexical production. Cognition.
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  ;Your Role: The studies reported here wer originally designed by me and Lisa Goffman. We sent a ms. to Cognition and were asked for an additional study, which I didn't get around to doing until Peter Richtsmeier needed a dissertation project. He took over this line of work from us and therefore became the first author.;Full Citation: Richtsmeier, P. T., Gerken, L. A., Goffman, L., & Hogan, T. (2009). Statistical frequency in perception affects children's lexical production. Cognition, 111(3), 372-377.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Lisa Goffman is a faculty member at Purdue.;
• Gerken, L., Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. -. (2009). From domain-generality to domain-sensitivity: 4-month-olds learn an abstract repetition rule in music that 7-month-olds do not. Cognition, 111(3).
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  Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining generalizations. In two experiments, 4-month-old and 7-month-old infants were familiarized with sequences of musical chords or tones adhering either to an AAB pattern or an ABA pattern. In both cases, the 4-month-olds learned the generalization, but the 7-month-olds did not. The success of the 4-month-olds appears to contradict an account that this type of pattern learning is the provenance of a language-specific rule-learning module. It is not yet clear what drives the age-related change, but plausible candidates include differential experience with language and music, as well as interactions between general cognitive development and stimulus complexity.
• Gerken, L., Gerken, L. -., Bahl, M., & Plante, E. (2009). Processing prosodic structure by adults with language-based learning disability. Journal of communication disorders, 42(5).
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  Two experiments investigated the ability of adults with a history of language-based learning disability (hLLD) and their normal language (NL) peers to learn prosodic patterns of a novel language. Participants were exposed to stimuli from an artificial language and tested on items that required generalization of the stress patterns and the hierarchical principles of stress assignment that could be inferred from the input. In Study 1, the NL group successfully generalized the patterns of stress heard during familiarization, but failed to show generalization of the hierarchical principles. The hLLD group performed at chance for both types of generalization items. In Study 2, the intensity of stress elements was increased. The performance of the NL group improved whereas the hLLD groups' performance decreased on both types of generalization items. The results indicate that NL adults are able to successfully abstract the complex hierarchical rules of stress if the prosodic cues are made sufficiently salient, but this same task is difficult for adults with hLLD. Learning outcomes: The reader will be able to understand: (1) the difference in the ability of hLLD and NL adults to process stress assignment in an implicit learning context and (2) that typical adults can abstract complex hierarchical rules of stress assignment when provided with strong cues.
• Richtsmeier, P. T., Gerken, L., Goffman, L., & Hogan, T. (2009). Statistical frequency in perception affects children's lexical production. Cognition, 111(3), 372-377.
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  PMID: 19338981;PMCID: PMC2719879;Abstract: Children's early word production is influenced by the statistical frequency of speech sounds and combinations. Three experiments asked whether this production effect can be explained by a perceptual learning mechanism that is sensitive to word-token frequency and/or variability. Four-year-olds were exposed to nonwords that were either frequent (presented 10 times) or infrequent (presented once). When the frequent nonwords were spoken by the same talker, children showed no significant effect of perceptual frequency on production. When the frequent nonwords were spoken by different talkers, children produced them with fewer errors and shorter latencies. The results implicate token variability in perceptual learning. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
• Richtsmeier, P. T., Gerken, L., Goffman, L., & Hogan, T. (2009). Statistical frequency in perception affects children's lexical production. Cognition, 111(3), 372-7.
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  Children's early word production is influenced by the statistical frequency of speech sounds and combinations. Three experiments asked whether this production effect can be explained by a perceptual learning mechanism that is sensitive to word-token frequency and/or variability. Four-year-olds were exposed to nonwords that were either frequent (presented 10 times) or infrequent (presented once). When the frequent nonwords were spoken by the same talker, children showed no significant effect of perceptual frequency on production. When the frequent nonwords were spoken by different talkers, children produced them with fewer errors and shorter latencies. The results implicate token variability in perceptual learning.
• Balcomb, F. K., & Gerken, L. (2008). Three-year-old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task. Developmental Science, 11(5), 750-760.
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  PMID: 18801131;Abstract: Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by responding on a non-verbal task originally developed for non-human animals, in which they had to access their knowledge states. Children learned a set of paired associates, and were given the option to skip uncertain trials on a recognition memory test. Accuracy for accepted items was significantly higher than for skipped on a subsequent memory task that included all items. Additionally, children whose memory-monitoring assessments more closely matched actual memory performance showed superior overall learning, suggesting a correlation between memory-monitoring and memory itself. The results suggest that children may have implicit access to internal knowledge states at very young ages, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning, even as infants. © 2008 The Authors.
• Gerken, L. (2008). Acquiring Linguistic Structure. Blackwell Handbook of Language Development, 173-190.
• Gerken, L. -., & Balcomb, F. (2008). Three-year-old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task..
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  ;Full Citation: Balcomb, F. K., & Gerken, L. A. (2008). Three-year-old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task. Developmental Science, 11, 750-760.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., & Bollt, A. (2008). Three exemplars allow at least some linguistic generalizations: Implications for generalization mechanisms and constraints.
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  ;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A., & Bollt, A. (2008). Three exemplars allow at least some linguistic generalizations: Implications for generalization mechanisms and constraints. Language Learning and Development, 4(3), 228-248.;Collaborative with undergraduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L., Balcomb, F. K., & Gerken, L. -. (2008). Three-year-old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task. Developmental science, 11(5).
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  Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by responding on a non-verbal task originally developed for non-human animals, in which they had to access their knowledge states. Children learned a set of paired associates, and were given the option to skip uncertain trials on a recognition memory test. Accuracy for accepted items was significantly higher than for skipped on a subsequent memory task that included all items. Additionally, children whose memory-monitoring assessments more closely matched actual memory performance showed superior overall learning, suggesting a correlation between memory-monitoring and memory itself. The results suggest that children may have implicit access to internal knowledge states at very young ages, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning, even as infants.
• Fisher, J., Plante, E., Vance, R., Gerken, L., & Glattke, T. J. (2007). Do children and adults with language impairment recognize prosodic cues?. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 50(3), 746-58.
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  Prosodic cues are used to clarify sentence structure and meaning. Two studies, one of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and one of adults with a history of learning disabilities, were designed to determine whether individuals with poor language skills recognize prosodic cues on par with their normal-language peers.
• Gerken, L. -. (2007). The role of prior experience in language acquisition.
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  ;Your Role: I helped to design the stimuli and commented on late drafts of the ms.;Full Citation: Lany, J., GĂłmez, R. L., & Gerken, L. A. (2007). The role of prior experience in language acquisition. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 31 (3), 481-507.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Fisher, J., Plante, E., Vance, R., & Glattke, T. J. (2007). Do children and adults with language impairment recognize prosodic cues?.
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  ;Your Role: The ms. is based on work of mine with infants. I helped to design the stimuli, interpret the data, and comment on late drafts of the ms.;Full Citation: Fisher, J., Plante, E., Vance, R., Gerken, L., & Glattke, T. J. (2007). Do children and adults with language impairment recognize prosodic cues? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(3), 746-758.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member at UA: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Goffman, L., & Lucchesi, J. (2007). Relations between segmental and motor variability in prosodically complex nonword sequences.
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  ;Your Role: The work is based on an ongoing collaboration between me and Lisa Goffman at Purdue. It began when she joined my lab for a semester during her sabbatical.;Full Citation: Goffman, L., Gerken, L., & Lucchesi, J. (2007). Relations between segmental and motor variability in prosodically complex nonword sequences. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(2), 444-458.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Collaborative with faculty member at Purdue and her student;
• Gerken, L., Lany, J., Gómez, R. L., & Gerken, L. -. (2007). The role of prior experience in language acquisition. Cognitive science, 31(3).
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  Learners exposed to an artificial language recognize its abstract structural regularities when instantiated in a novel vocabulary (e.g., Gómez, Gerken, & Schvaneveldt, 2000; Tunney & Altmann, 2001). We asked whether such sensitivity accelerates subsequent learning, and enables acquisition of more complex structure. In Experiment 1, pre-exposure to a category-induction language of the form aX bY sped subsequent learning when the language is instantiated in a different vocabulary. In Experiment 2, while naíve learners did not acquire an acX bcY language, in which aX and bY co-occurrence regularities were separated by a c-element, prior experience with an aX bY language provided some benefit. In Experiment 3 we replicated this finding with a 24-hour delay between learning phases, and controlled for prior experience with the aX bY language's prosodic and phonological characteristics. These findings suggest that learners, and the structure they can acquire, change as a function of experience.
• Goffman, L., Gerken, L., & Lucchesi, J. (2007). Relations between segmental and motor variability in prosodically complex nonword sequences. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(2), 444-458.
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  PMID: 17463240;Abstract: Purpose: To assess how prosodic prominence and hierarchical foot structure influence segmental and articulatory aspects of speech production, specifically segmental accuracy and variability, and oral movement trajectory variability. Method: Thirty individuals participated: 10 young adults, 10 children who are normally developing, and 10 children diagnosed with specific language impairment. Segmental error and segmental variability and movement trajectory variability were compared in low and high prosodic prominence conditions (i.e., strong and weak syllables) and in different prosodic foot structures. Results: Between-participants findings were that both groups of children showed more segmental error and segmental variability and more movement trajectory variability than did adults. A similar within-participant pattern of results was observed for all 3 groups. Prosodic prominence influenced both segmental and motor levels of analysis, with weak syllables produced less accurately and with more lip and jaw movement trajectory variability than strong syllables. However, hierarchical foot structure affected segmental but not motor measures of speech production accuracy and variability. Conclusions: Motor and segmental variables were not consistently aligned. This pattern of results has clinical implication because inferences about motor variability may not directly follow from observations of segmental variability. © American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
• Goffman, L., Gerken, L., & Lucchesi, J. (2007). Relations between segmental and motor variability in prosodically complex nonword sequences. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 50(2), 444-58.
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  To assess how prosodic prominence and hierarchical foot structure influence segmental and articulatory aspects of speech production, specifically segmental accuracy and variability, and oral movement trajectory variability.
• Lany, J., Gómez, R. L., & Gerken, L. (2007). The role of prior experience in language acquisition. Cognitive Science, 31(3), 481-507.
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  PMID: 21635305;Abstract: Learners exposed to an artificial language recognize its abstract structural regularities when instantiated in a novel vocabulary (e.g., Gómez, Gerken, & Schvaneveldt, 2000; Tunney & Altmann, 2001). We asked whether such sensitivity accelerates subsequent learning, and enables acquisition of more complex structure. In Experiment 1, pre-exposure to a category-induction language of the form aX bY sped subsequent learning when the language is instantiated in a different vocabulary. In Experiment 2, while naïve learners did not acquire an acX bcY language, in which aX and bY co-occurrence regularities were separated by a c-element, prior experience with an aX bY language provided some benefit. In Experiment 3 we replicated this finding with a 24-hour delay between learning phases, and controlled for prior experience with the aX bY language's prosodic and phonological characteristics. These findings suggest that learners, and the structure they can acquire, change as a function of experience. Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
• Bunnell, H. T., Vogel, I. B., Arvaniti, A., Backus, A., Barbosa, P., Hsuan, C. C., Cholin, J., Christophe, A., Clopper, C., Costa, A., D'Imperio, M., Dahan, D., Davis, C., DePaolis, R., Diaz-Campos, M., Diessel, H., Eskenazi, M., Fais, L., Ferrand, L., , Flege, J., et al. (2006). Editors' report for volume 49. Language and Speech, 49(4), 549-550.
• Gerken, L. (2006). Decisions, decisions: Infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible. Cognition, 98(3), B67-B74.
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  PMID: 15992791;Abstract: Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how learners might go about solving the induction problem for human language. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006). Decisions, decisions: Infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible. Cognition.
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  ;Your Role: Sole author and investigator;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A. (2006). Decisions, decisions: Infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible. Cognition, 98, B67-B74.;
• Gerken, L. -., Richardson, J., & Plante, E. (2006). Subcategory learning in normal and language learning-disabled adults: How much information do they need?. Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research.
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  ;Your Role: I designed the original study to do with normal infants and advised on how to adapt it for adults.;Full Citation: Richardson, J., Harris, L., Plante, E., & Gerken, L. A. (2006). Subcategory learning in normal and language learning-disabled adults: How much information do they need? Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research, 49, 1257-1266.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: collaboration with another UA faculty member and her student;
• Gerken, L., & Gerken, L. -. (2006). Decisions, decisions: infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible. Cognition, 98(3).
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  Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how learners might go about solving the induction problem for human language.
• Gerken, L., Richardson, J., Harris, L., Plante, E., & Gerken, L. -. (2006). Subcategory learning in normal and language learning-disabled adults: how much information do they need?. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 49(6).
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  The purpose of this experiment was to determine if nonreferential morphophonological information was sufficient to facilitate the learning of gender subcategories (i.e., masculine vs. feminine) in individuals with normal language (NL) and those with a history of language-based learning disabilities (HLD).
• Gerken, L. (2005). What develops in language development?. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 33, 153-192.
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  PMID: 16101117;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005). The acquisition of phonology based on input: A closer look at the relation of cross-linguistic and child language data. Lingua.
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  ;Your Role: I was the dissertation supervisor of Tania Zamuner.;Full Citation: Zamuner, T., L. A. Gerken, & Hammond, M. (2005). "The acquisition of phonology based on input: A closer look at the relation of cross-linguistic and child language data." Lingua 115(10), 1329-1474. ;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member at UA: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., Wilson, R., & Lewis, W. (2005). 17-month-olds can use distributionalcues to form syntactic categories. Journal of Child Language.
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  ;Your Role: I wrote the article. Wilson contributed stimuli and conceptual input. Williams wrote a web crawler to collect Russian statistics.;Full Citation: Gerken, L. A., R. Wilson, et al. (2005). 17-month-olds can use distributionalcues to form syntactic categories. Journal of Child Language 32, 249-268.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L., & Gerken, L. -. (2005). What develops in language development?. Advances in child development and behavior, 33.
• Gerken, L., Wilson, R., & Lewis, W. (2005). Infants can use distributional cues to form syntactic categories. Journal of Child Language, 32(2), 249-268.
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  PMID: 16045250;Abstract: Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure, American children aged 1 ; 5 were briefly familiarized with a partial Russian gender paradigm, with a subset of the paradigm members withheld. During test, infants listened on alternate trials to previously withheld grammatical items and ungrammatical items with incorrect gender markings on previously heard stems. Across three experiments, infants discriminated new grammatical from ungrammatical items, but like adults in previous studies, were only able to do so when a subset of familiarization items was double marked for gender category. The results suggest that learners can use distributional cues to category structure, to the exclusion of referential cues, from relatively early in the language learning process. © 2005 Cambridge University Press.
• Zamuner, T. S., Gerken, L., & Hammond, M. (2005). The acquisition of phonology based on input: A closer look at the relation of cross-linguistic and child language data. Lingua, 115(10), 1403-1426.
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  Abstract: Parallels between cross-linguistic and child language data have been used to support a theory of language development in which acquisition is mediated by universal grammar (Universal Grammar Hypothesis-UGH). However, structures that are frequent across languages are also typically the most frequent within a specific language. This confounding of cross-linguistic and language-specific data is consistent with the hypothesis that children acquire the grammar of the specific languages to which they are exposed, based on a less constrained acquisition mechanism (Specific Language Grammar Hypothesis-SLGH). These two theories of acquisition are contrasted in an examination of English-speaking children's acquisition of codas. Predictions for the UGH were based on cross-linguistic patterns and on frequency analyses of codas from 35 languages. Results showed that languages prefer coronal and sonorant codas; however, children's productions did not favor these codas. Predictions for the SLGH were established on the frequency of English codas, and significant correlations were found between children's coda productions and the frequency of English codas. Using this approach, children's coda production is best characterized with respect to frequently occurring properties of the input, which serve to organize children's linguistic representations. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
• Carter, A., & Gerken, L. (2004). Do children's omissions leave traces?. Journal of Child Language, 31(3), 561-586.
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  PMID: 15612390;Abstract: When English-speaking two-year-olds begin producing polysyllabic words, they often omit unstressed syllables that precede syllables with primary stress (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Klein, 1981; Gerken, 1994a). One proposed mechanism for these omissions is that children omit syllables at a phonological level, due to prosodic constraints that act on outputs. Under such accounts, it has been largely assumed that these syllables are simply missing, or deleted, from children's outputs. The present research consists of a pair of experiments that tested this assumption by investigating the acoustic properties of utterances manifesting or lacking weak initial syllable omissions. In the two experiments, 33 two-year-old children were asked to imitate sentences like 'He kissed Lucinda' (often reduced as expected to a disyllabic trochaic form, e.g. 'He kissed _cinda') and 'He kissed Cindy'. Durations of each child's imitations were measured from the onset of the verb to the onset of the name, for each pair of sentences containing the reduced or unreduced disyllabic forms, for example, 'kissed _cinda' vs. 'kissed Cindy'. Our results yielded a significantly longer duration for the verb-onset to name-onset portion of sentences containing reduced '_cinda'-type names than for sentences with 'Cindy'-type names. This finding provides evidence that children do not completely delete weak syllables. Rather, the data from the phonetic analysis indicate that some prosodic trace exists of the omitted syllable.
• Gerken, L. (2004). Nine-month-olds extract structural principles required for natural language. Cognition, 93(3), B89-B96.
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  PMID: 15178379;Abstract: Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3- and 5-syllable words from one of the two artificial languages that employed the same stress assignment constraints found in natural languages. Infants were able to generalize beyond the stress patterns encountered during familiarization to new patterns reflecting the same constraints. The results suggest that infants are able to rapidly extract the types of structural information required for human language. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
• Gerken, L., & Gerken, L. -. (2004). Nine-month-olds extract structural principles required for natural language. Cognition, 93(3).
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  Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3- and 5-syllable words from one of the two artificial languages that employed the same stress assignment constraints found in natural languages. Infants were able to generalize beyond the stress patterns encountered during familiarization to new patterns reflecting the same constraints. The results suggest that infants are able to rapidly extract the types of structural information required for human language.
• Gerken, L., Carter, A., & Gerken, L. -. (2004). Do children's omissions leave traces?. Journal of child language, 31(3).
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  When English-speaking two-year-olds begin producing polysyllabic words, they often omit unstressed syllables that precede syllables with primary stress (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Klein, 1981; Gerken, 1994a). One proposed mechanism for these omissions is that children omit syllables at a phonological level, due to prosodic constraints that act on outputs. Under such accounts, it has been largely assumed that these syllables are simply missing, or deleted, from children's outputs. The present research consists of a pair of experiments that tested this assumption by investigating the acoustic properties of utterances manifesting or lacking weak initial syllable omissions. In the two experiments, 33 two-year-old children were asked to imitate sentences like 'He kissed Lucinda' (often reduced as expected to a disyllabic trochaic form, e.g. 'He kissed _cinda') and 'He kissed Cindy'. Durations of each child's imitations were measured from the onset of the verb to the onset of the name, for each pair of sentences containing the reduced or unreduced disyllabic forms, for example, 'kissed cinda' vs. 'kissed Cindy'. Our results yielded a significantly longer duration for the verb-onset to name-onset portion of sentences containing reduced '_cinda'-type names than for sentences with 'Cindy'-type names. This finding provides evidence that children do not completely delete weak syllables. Rather, the data from the phonetic analysis indicate that some prosodic trace exists of the omitted syllable.
• Zamuner, T. S., Gerken, L., & Hammond, M. (2004). Phonotactic probabilities in young children's speech production. Journal of Child Language, 31(3), 515-536.
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  PMID: 15612388;Abstract: This research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-year-olds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and contained the identical coda across low and high phonotactic probability pairs. This allowed for comparisons of children's productions of the same coda consonant in low and high phonotactic probability environments. Children were significantly more likely to produce the same coda in high phonotactic probability non-words than in low phonotactic probability non-words. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonotactic probability is a predictor of coda production in English. Moreover, this finding provides further evidence for the role of the input and distribution of sound patterns in the ambient language as a basis for phonological acquisition.
• Carter, A. K., & Gerken, L. (2003). Similarities in weak syllable omissions between children with specific language impairment and normally developing language: A preliminary report. Journal of Communication Disorders, 36(2), 165-179.
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  PMID: 12609580;Abstract: Two-year-olds with normally developing language (NL) and older children with specific language impairment (SLI) omit initial weak syllables from words (e.g., "banana" ∼ "nana"). Previous research revealed a phonetic "trace" of syllables omitted by children with NL (Carter, 1999; Carter & Gerken, submitted for publication). The present study asked whether similar evidence could be found for omissions by children with SLI. Fourteen children with SLI produced sentences containing reduced or unreduced disyllabic proper names (e.g., "Feed_cinda," from "Feed Lucinda" vs. "Feed Cindy"). Acoustic analyses revealed a significantly longer duration for verb-onset to name-onset of sentences containing the reduced name, indicating that although segmental material is omitted, an acoustic trace remains. In addition, a phonological examination showed similarities between groups regarding sentential and syllabic factors that affect omission rates, as well as an interesting difference that suggests different strategies the groups use in acquiring adult targets. Learning outcomes: As a result of reading this article, participants should (1) have a better understanding of similarities and differences in the language production of children with specific language impairment and normally developing language, with regard to prosodic development, (2) be familiar with several models of the phenomenon of weak syllable omissions in children's developing language, and (3) recognize the importance of using a combination of linguistic analysis types when studying issues in child language production. © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
• Gerken, L., Gerken, L. -., & Carter, A. K. (2003). Similarities in weak syllable omissions between children with specific language impairment and normally developing language: a preliminary report. Journal of communication disorders, 36(2).
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  Two-year-olds with normally developing language (NL) and older children with specific language impairment (SLI) omit initial weak syllables from words (e.g., "banana" approximately "nana"). Previous research revealed a phonetic "trace" of syllables omitted by children with NL (Carter, 1999; Carter & Gerken, submitted for publication). The present study asked whether similar evidence could be found for omissions by children with SLI. Fourteen children with SLI produced sentences containing reduced or unreduced disyllabic proper names (e.g., "Feed_cinda," from "Feed Lucinda" vs. "Feed Cindy"). Acoustic analyses revealed a significantly longer duration for verb-onset to name-onset of sentences containing the reduced name, indicating that although segmental material is omitted, an acoustic trace remains. In addition, a phonological examination showed similarities between groups regarding sentential and syllabic factors that affect omission rates, as well as an interesting difference that suggests different strategies the groups use in acquiring adult targets.
• Gerken, L., Gerken, L. -., Plante, E., & Gomez, R. (2002). Sensitivity to word order cues by normal and language/learning disabled adults. Journal of communication disorders, 35(5).
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  Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 adults who lacked a personal or familial history of L/LD participated in a study designed to test sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. In an exposure phase, participants heard word strings constructed of novel CVC words for a period of 5 min. In a test phase, participants were asked to judge new sentences as either obeying or violating the rules of the grammar they heard. L/LD participants performed significantly below the comparison group on this task. The results suggest that this skill, which emerges early in life for normal children, is problematic for adults with L/LD.
• Maye, J., Werker, J. F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82(3), B101-B111.
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  PMID: 11747867;Abstract: For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
• Gomez, R. L., Gerken, L., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (2000). The basis of transfer in artificial grammar learning. Memory and Cognition, 28(2), 253-263.
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  PMID: 10790980;Abstract: In two experiments, we examined the extent to which knowledge of sequential dependencies and/or patterns of repeating elements is used during transfer in artificial grammar learning. According to one view of transfer, learners abstract the grammar's sequential dependencies and then learn a mapping to new vocabulary at test (Dienes, Altmann, and Gao, 1999). Elements that are repeated have no special status on this view, and so a logical prediction is that learners should transfer as well after exposure to a grammar without repetitions as after exposure to a grammar with them. On another view, repetition structure is the very basis of transfer (Brooks and Vokey, 1991; Mathews and Roussel, 1997). Learners were trained on grammars with or without repeating elements to test these competing views. Learners demonstrated considerable knowledge of sequential dependencies in their training vocabulary but did not use such knowledge to transfer to a new vocabulary. Transfer only occurred in the presence of repetition structure, demonstrating this to be the basis of transfer.
• Gómez, R. L., & Gerken, L. (2000). Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(5), 178-186.
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  Abstract: The rapidity with which children acquire language is one of the mysteries of human cognition. A view held widely for the past 30 years is that children master language by means of a language-specific learning device. An earlier proposal, which has generated renewed interest, is that children make use of domain-general, associative learning mechanisms. However, our current lack of knowledge of the actual learning mechanisms involved during infancy makes it difficult to determine the relative contributions of innate and acquired knowledge. A recent approach to studying this problem exposes infants to artificial languages and assesses the resulting learning. In this article, we review studies using this paradigm that have led to a number of exciting discoveries regarding the learning mechanisms available during infancy. These studies raise important issues with respect to whether such mechanisms are general or specific to language, the extent to which they reflect statistical learning versus symbol manipulation, and the extent to which such mechanisms change with development. The fine-grained characterizations of infant learning mechanisms that this approach permits should result in a better understanding of the relative contributions of, and the dynamic between, innate and learned factors in language acquisition.
• Gomez, R. L., & Gerken, L. (1999). Artificial grammar learning by 1-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge. Cognition, 70(2), 109-135.
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  PMID: 10349760;Abstract: Four experiments used the head-turn preference procedure to assess whether infants could extract and remember information from auditory strings produced by a miniature artificial grammar. In all four experiments, infants generalized to new structure by discriminating new grammatical strings from ungrammatical ones after less than 2 min exposure to the grammar. Infants acquired specific information about the grammar as demonstrated by the ability to discriminate new grammatical strings from those with illegal endpoints (Experiment 1). Infants also discriminated new grammatical strings from those with string-internal pairwise violations (Experiments 2 and 3). Infants in Experiment 4 abstracted beyond specific word order as demonstrated by the ability to discriminate new strings produced by their training grammar from strings produced by another grammar despite a change in vocabulary between training and test. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of language acquisition.
• Shady, M., & Gerken, L. (1999). Grammatical and caregiver cues in early sentence comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 26(1), 163-175.
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  PMID: 10217893;Abstract: In order to begin to learn a language, young children must be able to locate and distinguish linguistic units in the speech they hear. A number of cues in the speech stream may aid them in this task. Some cues, such as frequently occurring grammatical morphemes and prosodic changes at linguistic boundaries are inherent in the language. Other cues, such as short utterance length and placement of key words in utterance-final position, are not integral to the grammar of the language but are characteristically provided by caregivers. Although previous studies suggest that even infants are sensitive to many of these cues, it is not clear that young listeners actually use them in assigning structure to sentences. The experiments reported here asked whether 60 children aged 2;o to 2;2 used grammatical and caregiver cues in sentence comprehension and how different types of cues interacted. Two findings are of note : children used all of the cues tested, and the presence of one type of cue did not diminish use of another.
• Gerken, L., & McGregor, K. (1998). An Overview of Prosody and Its Role in Normal and Disordered Child Language. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 7(2), 38-48.
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  Abstract: This tutorial presents an overview of prosody and its application to specific language impairment. First, prosody is defined as both a phonological and acoustic phenomenon. Prosody is further explored through a review of research concerning perception and production of prosody in the normally developing child and in the child with specific language impairment. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of clinical implications and directions for future research.
• McNamara, M., Carter, A., McIntosh, B., & Gerken, L. (1998). Sensitivity to grammatical morphemes in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41(5), 1147-1157.
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  PMID: 9771636;Abstract: Grammatical morphemes, such as articles and auxiliary verbs, provide potentially useful information to language learners. However, children with specific language impairment (SLI) frequently fail to produce grammatical morphemes, raising questions about their sensitivity to them. To address this issue, two experiments were conducted in which 3- to 5-year-old children with SLI and with normally developing language (NL) heard sentences asking them to identify a picture corresponding to a named target word. The target occurred in either a grammatical sentence or one with an incorrectly used grammatical morpheme. In Experiment 1, the picture representing the target occurred with three unrelated distractor pictures. In Experiment 2, distractor sets included pictures that were semantically related to the target. In both studies, the SLI group chose fewer correct pictures when the target followed an incorrectly used morpheme. In Experiment 2, the SLI group chose more semantically related than unrelated distractors. These results suggest that children with SLI are sensitive to grammatical morphemes and that their incorrect picture choices may reflect a failure to maintain the target in memory.
• Shafer, V. L., Shucard, D. W., Shucard, J. L., & Gerken, L. (1998). An electrophysiological study of infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of English speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41(4), 874-886.
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  PMID: 9712134;Abstract: The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segmental properties of a subset of function morphemes were changed to make them atypical. The 11-month-olds exhibited significantly lower amplitude ERPs to the tones during the Modified story than to the Unmodified story, whereas the 10-month-olds showed no differences. These results suggest that the 11- month-olds discriminated the two versions of the story based on their representations of the phonological properties of English. Further, the tone- probe ERP method can successfully be used to study the development of speech perception in the pre-linguistic infant.
• Boyle, M. K., & Gerken, L. (1997). The influence of Lexical familiarity on children's function morpheme omissions: A nonmetrical effect?. Journal of Memory and Language, 36(1), 117-128.
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  Abstract: Previous research on children's production of function morphemes demonstrated an effect of meter, such that syllabic morphemes that fit a Strong-weak metrical template were omitted less frequently than morphemes not fitting such a template. The current research addressed the question of whether all omissions of syllabic function morphemes occur when a syllable does not fit a metrical template, or whether other factors, such as lexical familiarity, also play a role. Two experiments demonstrated that 2-year-olds are more likely to omit object articles from sentences containing novel nouns or verbs than sentences containing well-known words. Furthermore, familiarity appears to influence omissions independent of meter, suggesting that function morpheme omissions are caused by at least two mechanisms. One possible mechanism, control over utterance timing, is discussed. © 1997 Academic Press.
• Gerken, L. (1996). Prosodic structure in young children's Language Production. Language, 72(4), 683-712.
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  Abstract: Research in prosodic phonology, as well as experiments on adult speech production, suggest that segmental and suprasegmental processes in language are not governed directly by syntactic structure. Rather these processes reflect an independent prosodic structure, which includes prosodic categories such as metrical foot, prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Five experiments examined English-speaking two-year-olds' omissions of object articles in different prosodic structures. The data indicate that children omit unfooted syllables and that foot boundaries, in turn, are influenced by prosodic word and phonological phrase boundaries. Thus, it appears that children create prosodic structures remarkably similar to those proposed in theories of prosodic phonology.
• Gerken, L. (1996). Prosody's Role in Language Acquisition and Adult Parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25(2), 345-356.
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  PMID: 8667302;Abstract: There has been recent interest in the role of prosody in language acquisition as well as in adult sentence processing. Although the specific questions about prosody asked in these two domains may appear to differ, there are at least three basic issues that they have in common. These include the role of prosody in segmentation (i.e., deciding whether two adjacent sections of speech belong to the same or to different linguistic units), structural bracketing (i.e., discerning structural relations among linguistic units), and the reliability of prosodic cues. Data from both language acquisition and adult parsing research suggest that, although prosody almost certainly plays a role in segmentation, it probably does not aid in bracketing. Research on the reliability of prosodic cues suggest that these are probably more reliable and robust in child-directed than in adult-directed speech registers, raising questions about how child and adult listeners interpret the presence vs. absence of prosodic cues.
• G., D., Jusczyk, P. W., Mandel, D. R., Myers, J., Turk, A., & Gerken, L. (1995). The head-turn preference procedure for testing auditory perception. Infant Behavior and Development, 18(1), 111-116.
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  Abstract: The Head-Turn Preference Procedure (HPP) is valuable for testing perception of sustained auditory materials, particularly speech. This article presents a detailed description of the current version of HPP, new evidence of the objectivity of measurements within it, and an account of recent modifications. © 1995.
• Gerken, L., Murphy, W. D., & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Three- and four-year-olds' perceptual confusions for spoken words. Perception & Psychophysics, 57(4), 475-486.
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  PMID: 7596745;Abstract: Although infants have the ability to discriminate a variety of speech contrasts, young children cannot always use this ability in the service of spoken-word recognition. The research reported here asked whether the reason young children sometimes fail to discriminate minimal word pairs is that they are less efficient at word recognition than adults, or whether it is that they employ different lexical representations. In particular, the research evaluated the proposal that young children's lexical representations are more "holistic" than those of adults, and are based on overall acoustic-phonetic properties, as opposed to phonetic segments. Three- and four-year-olds were exposed initially to an invariant target word and were subsequently asked to determine whether a series of auditory stimuli matched or did not match the target. The critical test stimuli were nonwords that varied in their degree of phonetic featural overlap with the target, as well as in terms of the position(s) within the stimuli at which they differed from the target, and whether they differed from the target on one or two segments. Data from four experiments demonstrated that the frequency with which children mistook a nonword stimulus for the target was influenced by extent of featural overlap, but not by word position. The data also showed that, contrary to the predictions of the holistic hypothesis, stimuli differing from the target by two features on a single segment were confused with the target more often than were stimuli differing by a single feature on each of two segments. This finding suggests that children use both phonetic features and segments in accessing their mental lexicons, and that they are therefore much more similar to adults than is suggested by the holistic hypothesis. © 1995 Psychonomic Society, Inc.
• Turk, A. E., Jusczyk, P. W., & Gerken, L. (1995). Do English-learning infants use syllable weight to determine stress?. Language and speech, 38, Pt 2/-.
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  PMID: 8867758;Abstract: A linguistic factor governing the assignment of English lexical stress is syllable weight. Heavy syllables which have either a long (tense) vowel or are closed with a consonant are heavy and automatically bear stress. Are infants sensitive to this aspect of the English stress system? Previous research by Jusczyk, Cutler, and Redanz (1993) showed that nine-month-olds listened longer to words exhibiting Strong-Weak than Weak-Strong stress pattern. However, they did not investigate the role of syllable weight in this preference. A series of three experiments explored infants' preference for Strong-Weak versus Weak-Strong lists, but systematically manipulated the syllable weight of Strong syllables. The results suggest that syllable weight is not a necessary component of the Strong-Weak preference observed in previous studies. Rather it appears that infants prefer both words that begin with a Strong syllable and Strong syllables that are heavy. Thus, the results suggest that sensitivity to surface linguistic patterns and the principles that underlie them may be independent in early language acquisition.
• Gerken, L. (1994). A metrical template account of children's weak syllable omissions from multisyllabic words.. Journal of Child Language, 21(3), 565-584.
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  PMID: 7852473;Abstract: Young children learning English as well as many other languages frequently omit weakly stressed syllables from multisyllabic words. In particular, they are more likely to omit weak syllables from word-initial positions than from word-internal or -final positions. For example, the weak syllable of a weak-strong (WS) word like giraffe is much more likely to be omitted than the weak syllable of a SW word like tiger. Three hypotheses for this omission pattern have been offered. In two, children's weak syllable omissions reflect innate perceptual biases either to ignore initial weak syllables or to encode word-final syllables. In contrast, the SW Production Template Hypothesis states that children have a template for producing a strong syllable followed by an optional weak syllable. When they apply a series of SW templates to their intended utterances, weak syllables that do not fit the templates are more likely to be omitted than those that do. To compare the three hypotheses, young two-year-olds were asked to say four-syllable SWWS and WSWS nonsense words. Children's pattern of weak syllable preservations was highly consistent with the SW production template hypothesis, but not with the perception-based hypotheses. Implications of this research for children's function morpheme omissions and for the relation of metrical and segmental production templates are discussed.
• Gerken, L. A. (1994). Young Children′s Representation of Prosodic Phonology: Evidence From English-Speakers′ Weak Syllable Productions. Journal of Memory and Language, 33(1), 19-38.
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  Abstract: How can children use prosodic information such as pausing and pitch resetting to infer syntactic structure? This work considers the possibility that they do so by first constructing a prosodic representation similar to ones suggested by recent linguistic theory (e.g., Hayes, 1989; Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1981). The research examines 2-year-olds′ sensitivity to prosodic structure by comparing their weak syllable preservation patterns in comparably stressed multisyllabic words and sentences. Consistent with previous research, the results suggest a speech production model in which children apply to their multisyllabic words a series of strong-(weak) metrical templates (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Demuth, 1992, in press; Gerken, 1990, 1991, in press b; Gerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990; Wijnen, Krikaar, & den Os, in press). The new finding added by the current research is that children organize their intended sentences into phonological phrases and apply metrical templates within these prosodic units. Implications of children′s sensitivity to prosodic structure for syntax acquisition are discussed. © 1994 Academic Press. All rights reserved.
• Gerken, L., Jusczyk, P. W., & Mandel, D. R. (1994). When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases. Cognition, 51(3), 237-265.
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  PMID: 8194302;Abstract: According to prosodic bootstrapping accounts of syntax acquisition, language learners use the correlation between syntactic boundaries and prosodic changes (e.g., pausing, vowel lengthening, large increases or decreases in fundamental frequency) to cue the presence and arrangement of syntactic constituents. However, recent linguistic accounts suggest that prosody does not directly reflect syntactic structure but rather is governed by independent prosodic units such as phonological phrases. To examine the implications of this view for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, infants in Experiment 1 were presented with sentences in which pauses were inserted either between the subject noun phrase (NP) and verb or after the verb. Half of the infants heard sentences with lexical NP subjects, in which prosodic structure is consistent with syntactic structure. The other half heard sentences with pronoun subjects, in which prosodic structure does not mirror syntactic structure. In a preferential listening paradigm, infants in the lexical NP condition listened longer to materials containing pauses between the subject and verb, the main syntactic constituents. However, in the pronoun NP conditio, infants showed no difference in listening times for the two pause locations. To determine of other sentence types containing pronoun subjects potentially provide information about the syntactic constituency of these elements, infants in Experiment 2 heard yes-no questions with pronoun subjects, in which the prosodic structure reflects the constituency of the subject. Infants listened longer when pauses were inserted between the subject and verb than after the verb. Taken together, our results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure. Rather, learners must engage in active inferential processes, using cross-sentence comparisons and other types of information to arrive at the correct syntactic representation. © 1994.
• Gerken, L., & McIntosh, B. J. (1993). Interplay of Function Morphemes and Prosody in Early Language. Developmental Psychology, 29(3), 448-457.
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  Abstract: Previous studies have demonstrated that children are aware of the function morphemes in their language despite their failure to produce them. However, none of these studies tested whether children are aware of the linguistic contexts in which particular function morphemes occur. Only if children are aware of such co-occurrence patterns could they use function morphemes to determine the linguistic categories of words and phrases. Young 2-year-olds demonstrated their awareness of function morpheme co-occurrence patterns by performing better in a picture identification task when the target word was preceded by a grammatical article than an ungrammatical auxiliary. Children who heard the sentences produced in a female voice performed better than those who heard a male voice, and this was especially true for sentences exhibiting the most regular co-occurrence patterns.
• Gerken, L. (1991). The metrical basis for children's subjectless sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 30(4), 431-451.
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  Abstract: Young English speakers often omit sentential subjects but infrequently omit objects. In this paper I consider five accounts for these omissions that differ in the explanation of why children make omissions (grammar versus production constraints) and what causes the asymmetry in subject and object omissions. Hyams (1986, Language acquisition and the theory of parameters, Dordrecht, Reidel; 1987, Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, October) proposes that children are born with an innate grammar that causes them to omit pronominal subjects. Valian (1989, Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 28, 156-163) notes that subject deletion is acceptable in casual adult English: Based on these data, children omit subjects when sentence complexity puts too great a burden on the production system. On a pragmatic account (Bates, 1976, Language and context. New York: Academic Press; Greenfield & Smith, 1976, The structure of communication in early language development. New York: Academic Press), children have limited production abilities and omit the least communicatively informative elements: Because subjects typically contain given information, they are frequently omitted. P. Bloom (1989, Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 28, 57-63) argues that processing considerations cause children to expand sentences rightward, at the expense of leftward elements. Finally, I propose a metrical hypothesis in which children omit weakly stressed syllables, including pronouns and other function morphemes, particularly from iambic (weak-strong) feet. Data from an imitation task strongly support the metrical hypothesis over the others. The results are examined in light of a model of developing speech production. © 1991.
• Gerken, L., Landau, B., & Remez, R. E. (1990). Function Morphemes in Young Children's Speech Perception and Production. Developmental Psychology, 26(2), 204-216.
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  Abstract: Function morphemes or functors (e.g., articles and verb inflections) potentially provide children with cues for segmenting speech into constituents, as well as for labeling these constituents (e.g., noun phrase [NP] and verb phrase [VP]). However, the fact that young children often fail to produce functors may indicate that they ignore these cues in early language acquisition. Alternatively, children may be sensitive to functors in perception, but omit them in production. In 3 experiments, 2-year-olds imitated sentences that contained English or non-English functors and that were controlled for both suprasegmental and segmental factors. Children omitted English functors more frequently than non-English functors, indicating perceptual sensitivity to familiar vs. unfamiliar elements. The results suggest that children may be able to use functors early in language acquisition to solve the segmentation and labeling problems.
• Gerken, L., & Bever, T. G. (1986). Linguistic intuitions are the result of interactions between perceptual processes and linguistic universals. Cognitive Science, 10(4), 457-476.
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  Abstract: We found a direct relationship between variation in informants' grammaticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants' use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It has been proproposed that 'c-command', a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within-sentence coreference between pronouns and noun antecedents. The relative height of the pronoun and the noun in the phrase structure hierarchy determines whether the c-command constraint blocks coreference: Coreference is allowed only when the complement structure containing the noun is attached higher than the pronoun. We collected informants' judgments on pronoun-noun coreference in which the noun antecedent was contained in a complement structure dominated by either the Sentence-node (S-node) (higher than the pronoun) or the Verb-phrase-node (VP-node) (not higher than the pronoun). We also assessed each informant's perceptual clause-closure tendency using an auditory word-monitor paradigm. Informants who strongly segmented clauses in the perceptual task did not differentiate between an S- and VP-attachment of sentence complements, as revealed in their coreference judgments, but rather appeared to attach all sentence complements to the S-node. Informants with relatively weak perceptual segmentation differentiated their coreference judgments according to the node attachment of the complement structure. These results indicate that the linguistic universal controlling within-sentence coreference applies to the perceptually available structure for a sequence, not to its pure linguistic structure. Hence, linguistic intuitions result from the interaction of three independent faculties: language-specific knowledge, perceptual processes, and linguistic universals. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Proceedings Publications

• Newman-Smith, K., Yourison, R., Gerken, L., Bootzin, R. R., Nadel, L., & Gomez, R. L. (2012). State of rest in 17-month old infants differentially affects attention to new information. In Sleep, 35, A96.
• Gerken, L. -., & Balcomb, F. K. (2006, Jan). Does implicit metacognition provide a tool for self-guided learning in preschool children?. In Twenty-ninth annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
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  ;Your Role: advised student on research and helped write ms.;Full Citation: Balcomb, F. K. & Gerken, L. A. (2006). Does implicit metacognition provide a tool for self-guided learning in preschool children? In R. Sun (ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1003-1008). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2006, July). 4-month-olds discover algebraic patterns in music that 7.5-month-olds do not. In Twenty-ninth annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
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  ;Your Role: advised student on research and helped write ms.;Full Citation: Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. A. (2006). 4-month-olds discover algebraic patterns in music that 7.5-month-olds do not. In R. Sun (ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1198-1203). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;
• Gerken, L. -., & Shultz, T. (2005, Jan). A model of infant learning of word stress. In Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
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  ;Your Role: I supplied the infant data and discussed possible model constraints.;Full Citation: Shultz, T. R. and L. A. Gerken (2005). A model of infant learning of word stress. Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ, Erlbaum: 2015-2020.;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: faculty member at McGill;

Presentations

• Kalim, G., Gerken, L., & Gomez, R. L. (2017, November). Language learning in the face of inter-talker variation: when talker voice proves helpful. Boston University Conference on Child Language.
• Gerken, L. (2016, Fall). Comparing the Difficulty of Different Types of Linguistic Generalizations. Invited Colloquium. Paris France: Paris Cognitive Science CNRS.
• Gerken, L. (2014, July). Talker variability does not always facilitate infants’ word learning: The case of bimodal talker gender.. International Conference on Infant Studies..
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  Quam, C., Knight, S., & Gerken, L.A. (2014). Talker variability does not always facilitate infants’ word learning: The case of bimodal talker gender. International Conference on Infant Studies.
• Gerken, L. (2014, May). Why are infants precocious language learners? Implications for adult second-language learning and Specific Language Impairment. School of Mind, Brain and Behavior Poster Session.
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  Quam, C., Lotto, A., Golisch, K., Gallegos, C., & Gerken, L.A. (2014). Why are infants precocious language learners? Implications for adult second-language learning and Specific Language Impairment. School of Mind, Brain and Behavior Poster Session. Winner of $50 prize for runner-up for best poster award.
• Gerken, L. (2014, November). Why are Infants Precocious Language Learners? Implications for Adult Second-Language Learning. 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
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  C. Quam, K. Golisch, A. Lotto, L. Gerken: Why are Infants Precocious Language Learners? Implications for Adult Second-Language Learning
• Gerken, L. (2014, October). Prosody as a cue to hierarchical structure for toddlers and adults.. 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
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  Hawthorne, K., Rudat, L., & Gerken, L.A. (2014). Prosody as a cue to hierarchical structure for toddlers and adults. Poster to be presented at the 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
• Gerken, L. -. (2012, 2012-03-01). Statistics and grammars in infant language development. Annual Ingemann Invited Linguistics Colloquium. U Kansas.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2012, 2012-05-01). Another case of less is more: Infants show more robust generalization from a few examples than from many examples. International conference on infant studies. Minneapolis.
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  ;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -. (2012, 2012-09-01). The nature (and nurture) of infant language learning. Cog Sci Colloq. UA.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2012, 2012-10-01). What sort of language learner is a human infant. Linguistics Colloquium. UA.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -., & Hawthorne, M. (2012, 2012-01-01). Prosodic bootstrapping of clauses: Is it language-specific?. LSA.
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  ;Your Role: helped design research;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Mazuka has a lab in Japan where Hawthorne spent the summer;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Hawthorne, M. (2012, 2012-05-01). The trans-linguistic robustness of prosodic cues in syntax acquisition. International conference on infant studies. Minneapolis.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the study;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with undergraduate student: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Mazuka has a lab in Japan where Hawthorne spent the summer;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Hawthorne, M. (2012, 2013-02-01). The changing role of prosody in syntax acquisition across ages. BU Conference on Language Development. Boston.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the research;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Mazuka has a lab in Japan where Hawthorne spent the summer;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Quam, K. (2012, 2012-05-01). The role of variability in children's phonological learning. International conference on infant studies. Minneapolis.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the research;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Quam is a post doc, Knight is my lab manager;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., Dawson, C., & Tenenbaum, . (2012, 2012-05-01). Surprise! An experience-based source of hypotheses. International conference on infant studies. Minneapolis.
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  ;Your Role: I organized a symposium and gave this talk;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: Chatila was a high school intern in my lab, Tenenbaum is a professor at MIT;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -. (2011, 2011-08-01). Language and the mind. Spirit of the Senses Salon. Phoenix.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Community Outreach;
• Gerken, L. -. (2011, 2011-11-01). 17. Three new findings from studies of infant cognitive development. Grand Rounds. UA Medical School.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Community Outreach;
• Gerken, L. -., & Hawthorne, K. (2011, 2011-01-01). Can infants use prosody to learn about clauses?. LSA. Pittsburg, PA.
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  ;Your Role: I helped to design the research;Refereed: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Professional Organization;
• Gerken, L. -. (2010, 2010-01-01). Why babies are smarter than you are. UA Distinguished Lecture Series. Arizona Inn.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Community Outreach;
• Gerken, L. -. (2010, 2010-03-01). The making of a mind. University of Arizona College of Science Spring Lecture Series. Centennial Hall.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Community Outreach;
• Gerken, L. -. (2010, 2010-04-01). Predicting and explaining babies. Invite Cognitive Science Colloquium. SUNY at Buffalo.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2010, 2010-04-01). Predicting and explaining babies. Invited Language and Mind Colloquium. University of Rochester.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2010, 2010-11-01). It's about time: Infant learning over minutes and months and what it might tell us about machine learning models. SISTA Colloquium Series. UA.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, . (2010, 2010-07-01). The role of “Explaining Away” in human unsupervised grammar induction.. Cognitive Science Society. Portland, OR.
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  ;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2010, 2010-03-01). Before domain-specificity: When simple matters more. International Conference on Infant Studies. Baltimore, MD..
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  ;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2010, 2010-03-01). When diversity of preferences reflects diversity of learners. International Conference on Infant Studies. Baltimore, MD.
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  ;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -. (2009, 2009-01-01). Feet Change with Exposure to Language. CUNY Phonology Forum Conference on the Foot. New York City.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -. (2009, 2009-05-01). Is patience a virtue for a probabilistic learner?. Probabilistic Models of Cognitive Development. Banff Canada.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -. (2008, 2008-02-01). Exploring a Hypothesis Selection Approach to Language Acquisition. UCLA Linguistics Dept..
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  Gerken, L. A. (2008). Exploring a Hypothesis Selection Approach to Language Acquisition. Invited talk, UCLA Linguistics Department, February.;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Gerken, L. -., & Tenenbaum, J. (2008, 2008-03-01). Exploring Bayesian Hypothesis Selection as a Learning Mechanism Available to Infants. Internationa Conference on Infant Studies. Vancouver.
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  Gerken, L.A. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2008). Exploring Bayesian Hypothesis Selection as a Learning Mechanism Available to Infants. International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, March.;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Other collaborative: Yes;Specify other collaborative: ;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007, 2007-03-01). Getting Better By Getting Worse - Developmental Differences in Infant Language Learning. Second Language and Teaching Student Association Annual Conference. University of Arizona.
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  ;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007, 2007-04-01). Baby Bayesians? Some Recent Discoveries About Infant Generalization. CNS weekly meeting. University of Arizona.
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  ;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007, 2007-07-01). Baby Bayesians? Evidence for Statistical Hypothesis Selection in Infant Language Learning. International Conference On Computational Linguistics. Prague.
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  I was the keynote speaker at 'Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing' section of this conference.;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007, 2007-09-01). The Relation of Poverty of the Stimulus and Learning by Induction. Cognitive Science Master Seminar. University of Arizona.
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  ;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Gerken, L. -. (2007, 2007-10-01). What is the relation of cross-linguistic patterns and language development?. HOWL. Johns Hopkins University.
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  invited talk at a small annual workshop on interdisciplinary issues in human language;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -., & Wedel, A. (2007, 2007-09-01). Exploring the Relation Between Cross-Linguistic Patterns and Language Acquisition. Cognitive Science Colloquium Series. University of Arizona.
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  ;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with faculty member in unit: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Gerken, L. -., & Balcomb, F. K. (2006, 2006-07-01). Does implicit metacognition provide a tool for self-guided learning in preschool children?. Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the research and analyze the data.;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2006, 2006-07-01). 4-month-olds discover algebraic patterns in music that 7.5-month-olds do not. Cognitive Science. Vancouver.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the research and analyze the data.;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & Dawson, C. (2006, 2006-11-01). 4-month-olds discover algebraic patterns in music that 7.5-month-olds do not. BU Conference on Language Development. Boston.
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  ;Your Role: I helped design the research and analyze the data.;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Collaborative with graduate student: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006, 2006-04-01). Some generalizations about generalization in language development. invited colloquium. Austin.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006, 2006-05-01). Some generalizations about generalization in language development. invited colloquium. Madison.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006, 2006-05-01). Some generalizations about generalization in language development. invited colloquium. San Diego.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006, 2006-08-01). Three questions about infant linguistic generalization. invited NSF-sponsored worksop talk. Boulder.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006, 2006-09-01). Linguistic generalization by human infants. invited Max Planck workshop. Leipzip Germany.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -., & none, . (2006, 2007-04-01). What infant learning in the laboratory can tell us about the nature of linguistic categories. invited colloquim. San Diego.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005, 2005-02-01). Baby Bayesians? Exploring the bases of generalization in human language. University Lecture Series. Columbia University.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005, 2005-09-01). Infant Generalization. NIH Workshop on Infant Development. Tempe, AZ.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Government/Policy Audiences;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005, 2005-10-01). A slip of the tongue approach to toddler language errors. KIDTALK workshop. University of Arizona.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005, 2005-11-01). What is statistical learning?. BU Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005, 2005-12-01). Some Generalizations About Infant Linguistic Generalization. Center for Cognitive Science Colloquium Series. University of Pennsylvania.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Gerken, L. -. (2005, 2005-12-01). Some Generalizations About Infant Linguistic Generalization. Cognitive Science Colloquium. SUNY Buffalo.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;

Poster Presentations

• Lotto, A. J., Gerken, L., Quam, C., Lotto, A. J., Gerken, L., Quam, C., Lotto, A. J., Gerken, L., Quam, C., Lotto, A. J., Gerken, L., & Quam, C. (2014, January). Differences in language-learning biases across age and learner groups. Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
• Lotto, A. J., Quam, C., Golisch, K., & Gerken, L. (2014, November). Why are Infants Precocious Language Learners? Implications for Adult Second-Language Learning. Boston University Conference on Language Development.
• Davis, A. K., & Gerken, L. (2013, November). Learning words from multiple talkers helps children's production but not perception. The Acoustical Society of America.
• Gonzales, K., Gerken, L. A., & Gómez, R. L. (2013, November). Infants prioritize regularity spontaneously during incidental learning. Poster presented at the Learning to Attend, Attending to Learn workshop. San Diego CA.
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  Gómez, R.L. (Presenter).
• Gonzales, K., Gerken, L. A., & Gómez, R. L. (2013, November). Infants prioritize transient grammar structure: Evidence from artificial language learning. Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Psycholinguistics. Fuzhou, China.
• Hawthorne, K. E., & Gerken, L. (2013, November). Younger versus older infants' use of prosody-like boundaries to locate musical phrases. The Acoustical Society of America.

Others

• Gerken, L. (2016, October). Learning language moment to moment. Arizona Daily Star.
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  Even though they probably haven’t yet said a word, babies between 6 and 12 months old have already learned about many of the rules of their language or languages. For example, babies who are exposed to English tacitly know that ‘s’ can be followed by ‘t’, ‘p’, or ‘k’ but not by ‘f’— although the ‘sf’ combination is used in other languages, indicating that all of these combinations are pronounceable.But does it take a baby several months or just moments to learn a language rule? To find out, we brought 11-month-olds into the Language Development Laboratory and had them sit on a parent’s lap in a quiet booth. After listening to 2 minutes of calming music, babies heard four words that follow a rule found in many languages. One rule was that the two consonants in the word must both be made either with the lips (p, b, f and v) or the palate (the part of your mouth you burn with hot pizza; t, d, and z). The words in this study were poba, taza, beepa, deta.Afterward, babies heard new rule-following words on some trials, for example, pava) and rule-violating words that mix consonants made with the lips and with the palate on other trials, for example, tifa. Babies looked longer toward the speaker when we played the rule-violating words, suggesting that they had learned the rule from the four words and shifted their interest to words that have a different pattern. In other words, babies can zero in on a language rule quicker than you can get them to eat their breakfast.