Peter Jusczyk's death

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,

I thought that people would find the following article helpful as a summary
of some of the aspects of Peter Jusczyk's many contributions to our field.

--Brian MacWhinney



                      Copyright 2001 / Los Angeles Times

                                Los Angeles Times

                      August 30, 2001 Thursday  Home Edition


 Peter Jusczyk; Showed How Babies Develop Language

 BYLINE: ELAINE WOO, TIMES STAFF WRITER

 BODY:

    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.
>
> GRAPHIC: PHOTO: PETER JUSCZYK, He demonstrated infants' ability to
> recognize language.

Additional information:
Peter's funeral was held Wednesday, August 29, 2001, at
St. Ignatius RC Church in Baltimore, MD.

The family has requested donations in lieu of flowers to be sent to:

Jusczyk Scholarship Fund
c/o Brown University
Box 1893
Providence, RI 02912


The Jusczyk home address (for cards and letters) is:

301 Northway
Baltimore, MD 21218