How do children begin to link concepts in the world with particular sound patterns? Most research has focused particularly on words, and even that is difficult. Imagine you're an infant, still learning language. Your parent raises a cup of coffee and says, "Zoip!" What does "zoip" mean? There are many possibilities: it could mean cup, mug, coffee, drink, hot, yummy . . .

The reality is that most of the time, there are multiple interpretations for any new word. Some of our research has focused on whether the sound pattern itself may be a cue to a word's meaning.

But not only does the child need to learn words, but he or she also needs to learn markers, such as the plural marker. This isn't even as large as a word, and it actually comes in multiple forms (-ez, -z, -s...). How does the child learn this, and what stages does he or she go through?

When we listen to people talk there are often other noises in the background -- we don't always find ourselves in ideal listening situations. Sometimes noises may even cover up (or "mask") part of what is said. As adults, we use our prior knowledge of the language to help us fill in those gaps -- in fact, we rarely even notice that anything was masked!

Children don't have the same amount of background knowledge as adults, however, and thus may be more affected by these types of noise. We are investigating when children start being able to use their language knowledge to grasp the speaker's intended meaning, even when it wasn't entirely audible.