website summary of http://kechambers.com/academics last modified 2010.06.21 [overview] ------------------------------- kyle e. chambers gustavus adolphus college department of psychology 800 west college avenue saint peter, mn 56082 gmail: kechambers employment 2008-present, assistant professor, gustavus adolphus college 2007-2008, visiting assistant professor, reed college 2004-2007, postdoctoral fellow, university of rochester education 2004, PhD, cognitive psychology, university of illinois 2002, MA, cognitive psychology, university of illinois 1998, BA, psychology, oklahoma state university 1998, BA, philosophy, oklahoma state university research The language processing system is continually in flux, adapting to recent experience, while maintaining the accumulated experience of a lifetime of speaking and listening. My research examines the mechanisms and representations used by the language processing system to accommodate and integrate recent changes in the sound patterns of the linguistic environment. Specifically, I am interested in the mechanisms that might be used by adults to adjust to new accents and acquire second languages; and how infants might use similar mechanisms to learn the phonology of their native language and begin the process of lexical development. representative publications Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (in press). A vowel is a vowel: Generalizing newly-learned phonotactic constraints to new contexts. Fisher, C., Church, B., & Chambers, K. E. (2004). Learning to identify spoken words. In D. G. Hall and S. R. Waxman (Eds.) Weaving a lexicon (pp. 3-40). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chambers, K.E., Onishi, K.H., & Fisher, C. (2003). Infants learn phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience. Cognition, 87, B69-B77. Onishi, K. H., Chambers, K. E., & Fisher, C. (2002). Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory exposure. Cognition, 83, B13-B23. Fisher, C., Hunt, C. M., Chambers, K. E., & Church, B. A. (2001). Abstraction and specificity in preschoolers' representations of novel spoken words. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 665-687. recent presentations Khu, M., Nitka, D., Chambers, K. E., & Onishi, K. H. (2009, April). The effect of phonotactic regularities on infant word learning. Poster presented to the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO, US. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Wu, Y., Lomibao, J. (2007, March). Statistical Learning and word recognition: Nonwords and words mingle. In K. E. Chambers & K. H. Onishi (Chairs), From artificial language learning to normal language processing. Symposium held at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA, USA. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Wu, Y., Lomibao, J. (2006, November). Nonwords and words mingle. Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, USA. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Wu, Y., Lomibao, J. (2006, June). The influence of nonwords on recognizing words. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Kyoto, Japan. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Fisher, C. (2005, April). Rule abstraction and speech sound representation in infancy. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of Society for Research in Child Development, Atlanta, GA, USA. Chambers, K. E., & Onishi, K. H. (2004, November). Generalizing phonotactic regularities across vowel contexts in infancy. Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, USA. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2004, May). Constraints on phonotactic learning in infancy. In K. E. Chambers (chair), Distributional learning in phonological development: Generalizations and constraints. Symposium at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Chicago, IL, USA. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2003, November). Going beyond the input: Extending newly learned phonotactic regularities. Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, USA. Chambers, K. E. & Onishi, K. H. (2003, April). Acquisition of complex phonotactic regularities in infancy. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa, FL, USA. Chambers, K. E. & Onishi, K. H. (2002, November). Generalizing phonotactic regularities. Poster presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Kansas City, MO, USA. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2002, June). Generalizing phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience. Poster presented at the Eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology, New Haven, CT, USA. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2002, April). Phonotactic acquisition in infancy. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Toronto, CAN. Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2001, October). The continuity of phonotactic learning. Poster presented to the Cognitive Development Society, Virginia Beach, VA, USA. Chambers, K. E., & Onishi, K. H. (2001, May). Within-syllable phonotactic learning. Paper presented to the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL, USA. Chambers, K. E., & Onishi, K. H. (2001, April). Distributional learning of phonotactic constraints. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN, USA. [research] ------------------------------- phonological learning Not too many parents name their baby, "Bleeber," but for English speakers, even though "Bleeber" is a strange name, most parents would agree that it is a better name than "Tlibit." One reason that "Tlibit" is worse than "Bleeber" is because it violates the sound regularities of English. In English, words don't begin with the "tl" sound sequence even though it shows up in other places, for example, at the end of the word "little." Regularities in the location of sounds for a particular language have been shown to influence adult language processing. We have been investigating when and how infants learn these types of regularities. For example, we had 10-month-old infants listen to words from a miniature language ("fes," "kep," "bes,"...) that displayed regularities in the position of consonants--for example, whenever "f" was heard, it was heard at the beginning of a word, but whenever "p" was heard, it was heard at the end of a word. After listening to this language for a couple of minutes, infants heard new words that they hadn't heard previously. These new words either followed the same sound regularities as the words from the miniature language (e.g., "fip") or violated those sound regularities (e.g., "pif"). Using the headturn preference procedure, we looked to see if infants could tell these two types of words apart, and they can, suggesting that after listening just a couple of minutes, infants are already picking up on the regularities present in the language. Infants seem to have very powerful abilities to learn patterns in their environment. the developing lexicon As adults, we know what the words "taxicab" and "airplane" mean, but at some point in our lives, we didn't. Even as adults, we run into new words that we have never heard before--words we have to look up in the dictionary (or type into Google). Infants are constantly hearing sequences of sounds that are new and have no meaning for them. Do these sequences have any effect on words that infants do know? To address this question, we had infants listen to nonwords that displayed regularities. For example, when "b"s occurred they were at the beginning of nonwords, and when "m"s occurred, they were at the end of nonwords ("bem","bip","kem",..). Then infants saw pictures of two common objects that could be labeled with words they probably know, like "bear" and "mouse". The label for one object was consistent with the regularities displayed by the nonwords (e.g., "bear" and "bem" both have "b" at the beginning) while the label for the other object was inconsistent with the same regularities (e.g., "mouse" and "kem" don't have "m" in the same location). When children were asked to find one of the objects (e.g., "Where's the bear? Can you find it?"), they looked at the object more quickly when the label was consistent rather than inconsistent with the regularities displayed by the nonwords. This result demonstrates that nonwords and words mingle, and it starts to address important issues about when new linguistic information is integrated with established linguistic knowledge. [teaching] ------------------------------- courses regularly taught first term seminar (fts 100) general psychology (psy 100) research methods II (psy 225) developmental psychology (psy 234) psychology of language (psy 344)