Infant and Toddler Language Studies

MEET THE TEAM

	Professor Marilyn Vihman Marilyn Vihman has gone through a number of changes in direction, beginning with an undergraduate degree in Russian, then a PhD in Linguistics, and finally a shift to studying children, with a focus on how they make the transition from babbling to speech. She was Director of the Child Phonology program at Stanford University in California for several years in the '80s. When she left to move to the east coast she wrote a book, Phonological Development (Blackwell, 1996), which provides information for students and other researchers about what was known to date about both infant vocal production and speech perception. Currently, in addition to teaching in Language and Linguistics at York and taking overall responsibility for one of our research projects, she is writing a book about language development with Ginny Gathercole (Psychology, University of Wales Bangor).
	Dr Tamar Keren-Portnoy Tamar got all her academic degrees at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her PhD was on the first word combinations of toddlers learning to speak Hebrew. Tamar came to Britain to work alongside Professor Marilyn Vihman on phonological acquisition, that is, how infants and children learn the sound systems of their language. Tamar is managing all of our current projects, and is responsible for analyzing the data and writing up the results together with Marilyn and Rory. When Tamar moved here from Israel she brought along her husband and two children (aged 3 and 7 at the time). The family first moved to North Wales, where the children learned to speak both English and Welsh, and then to York, where they are learning Yorkshire and forgetting their Welsh.
	Dr Rory DePaolis Rory began his academic life with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Acoustics - all of which might seem some little distance away from the study of babies! While both he and Marilyn were teaching in Louisiana in the '90s they began thinking about doing some research together. When Marilyn moved to Wales, Rory and his family moved as well, so that Rory could set up an infant speech perception lab to test the ideas he and Marilyn had been discussing. Despite their success in gaining two ESRC awards in this period Rory returned to the US in 1998, taking up a teaching post in Communication Sciences and Disorders at James Madison University. In 2004 he returned to Wales on sabbatical and then was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship to carry out his new ideas about how to test whether children's vocal production affects the way that they listen to speech. Now Rory designs our lab experiments and is a consultant on all our projects. Unfortunately we only see him in the summertime, when he comes to help with the research here, under our latest ESRC funding.