Peter Jusczyk; Showed How Babies Develop Language
Peter W. Jusczyk, a Johns Hopkins University researcher whose pioneering studies advanced scientists’ understanding of how and when babies develop language, has died. He was 53.
Jusczyk died of a heart attack Aug. 23 while attending a conference in Pacific Grove, Calif., according to a spokesman for Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
He headed the Infant Language Research Laboratory at the university, where he also taught psychology and cognitive science.
Through sophisticated experiments that gauged babies’ responses to verbal cues, Jusczyk showed that infants have the ability to recognize sound patterns and match them to their meanings long before they begin to babble.
He made one of his most significant findings while attending Brown University in the early 1970s. He co-wrote, with Peter Eimas, an influential study that used sucking responses to show that month-old babies can perceive subtle differences in sounds, such as between “pa” and “ba.”
Published in the journal Science in 1971, the study provided some of the first hard evidence supporting theories by linguist Noam Chomsky that language ability is hard-wired in the human brain.
It also altered another long-held belief: that babies learn speech by making sounds themselves. Babies apparently “don’t need to babble before they can tell the difference between sounds,” Jusczyk told an interviewer in 1998.
This early research by Jusczyk and Eimas reinvigorated a field of investigation that had its roots in the work of 19th century evolutionist Charles Darwin. It enticed other researchers to study infants’ language perception and development. Others subsequently found that babies can differentiate between sounds even at birth.
Jusczyk’s work “got explosive over the years,” said Barbara Landau, a professor of cognitive science at Hopkins who studies toddlers and children. She called him one of the most prolific and energetic researchers in the field, whose work illuminated “just how rich the underlying capacities for speech are.”
In another important study, Jusczyk found that babies as young as 6 months could associate words with their meanings.
He and colleague Ruth Tincoff showed two dozen 6-month-olds videotapes of their parents on two monitors. When a synthesized voice spoke the word “mommy” or “daddy,” the researchers found that the infants looked at the video image of the correct parent significantly more often than would have been expected by chance.
To rule out the possibility that the babies might associate “mommy” with any woman and “daddy” with any man, Jusczyk exposed another set of 6-month-olds to videos of other mothers and fathers, but hearing the words did not trigger an association. That told Jusczyk that the infants had an explicit understanding of “mommy” as “my mommy” and “daddy” as “my daddy.”
“Six months is the youngest age anyone has been able to show that children seem to pair sounds with a specific meaning,” Jusczyk said in an interview after the findings were published in the March 1999 issue of the journal Psychological Science. In previous studies, 8 or 10 months was the youngest age at which babies were thought to have that capacity.
In other experiments Jusczyk found that babies as young as 4 1/2 months could recognize familiar sounds, such as their names. By 8 1/2 months, Jusczyk and colleague Sven Mattys found, babies can tell where words begin and end.
Over the years, Jusczyk developed some ingenious methods for working with babies, who are notoriously difficult test subjects.
To gauge the memory of 8-month-olds, for instance, he and his colleagues played tape-recorded stories for a group of babies once a day for 10 days. Two weeks later, the children were brought into his lab at Hopkins. Perched on a parent’s lap, each child was positioned between two speakers, each topped with an eye-catching light. The researchers then measured the amount of time the babies looked at the speaker when it emitted a key word from the stories.
The babies listened significantly longer to words from the stories--even unfamiliar words like “python,” “peccaries” and “hornbill.” Their remarkably early ability to retain language might account for the sudden vocabulary explosions that occur between 6 and 9 months and again at about 18 months, Jusczyk speculated.
Although his research shone a bright light on the language sensitivity of the very youngest, Jusczyk discouraged the “super-baby” syndrome. He warned that just because a 4-month-old might gurgle with delight at the sound of her own name did not mean it was time for flashcards.
“That’s the worst thing you can do,” he told the Baltimore Sun in a 1998 interview. “You ought to do what’s natural, what’s fun for the child. There’s no room for drill at that age.”
Jusczyk taught for six years at the State University of New York at Buffalo before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1996. He also taught at several other institutions, including the University of Oregon and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Born in Providence, R.I., he graduated from Brown University in 1970. He earned a master’s degree in 1971 and a PhD in psychology in 1975 from the University of Pennsylvania.
He wrote “The Discovery of Spoken Language,” published in 1997, which examined the acquisition of language in the first year of life.
Jusczyk is survived by his wife, Ann Marie, who ran the Infant Language Research Laboratory at Hopkins with him; two children, Karla and Thaddeus; his mother; and a brother and sister.
