Drew Weatherhead

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University

Introduction In two experiments, we examine the degree to which adults (Experiment 1) and children 5-to-8-years-old (Experiment 2) use diversity to infer a group’s cooperative and innovative potential. Methods Participants heard a child-friendly vignette about a competition in which a homogenous and diverse group were competing to design the perfe...

Background/Objectives: Speaker race and the listener’s language experience (i.e., monolinguals vs. bilinguals) have both been shown to influence accent intelligibility independently. Speaker race specifically is thought to be informed by learned experiences (exemplar model) or individual biases and attitudes (bias-based model). The current study in...

In four experiments, we explored children’s use of shared clothing style to infer grouplevel knowledge. In Experiment 1, 3-and 4-year-olds and 6-and-7-year-olds inferred that those wearing identical clothing (i.e., same style, color, and pattern) were likely to share the same knowledge, while those who wore different clothing were not. In Experimen...

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two...

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front vowe...

Previous work indicates mutual exclusivity in word learning in monolingual, but not bilingual toddlers. We asked whether this difference indicates distinct conceptual biases, or instead reflects best-guess heuristic use in the absence of context. We altered word-learning contexts by manipulating whether a familiar- or unfamiliar-race speaker introd...

Three experiments examined the role of audiovisual speech on 24-month-old monolingual and bilinguals’ performance in a fast-mapping task. In all three experiments, toddlers were exposed to familiar trials which tested their knowledge of known word–referent pairs, disambiguation trials in which novel word–referent pairs were indirectly learned, and...

Can children tell how different a speaker's accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger acce...

Young children make inferences about speakers based on their accents. Here, we show that these accent-based inferences are influenced by information about speakers' geographic backgrounds. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 60) inferred that a speaker would be more likely to have the same cultural preferences as another speaker with the same a...

How do our expectations about speakers shape speech perception? Adults' speech perception is influenced by social properties of the speaker (e.g., race). When in development do these influences begin? In the current study, 16-month-olds heard familiar words produced in their native accent (e.g., "dog") and in an unfamiliar accent involving a vowel...

Children not only recognize the function of an artifact, but they actively protest when others use it in an atypical way. In two experiments, we asked whether children view artifact function as universal or as culturally dependent. In both experiments children watched videos of two actors who used common artifacts atypically (e.g. a woman using a f...

Three experiments examined 4- to 6-year-olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4- to 5-year-olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both experimen...

What do infants hear when they read lips? In the present study, twelve-to-thirteen-month-old infants viewed a talking face produce familiar and unfamiliar words. The familiar words were of three types: in Experiment 1, they were produced correctly (e.g., “bottle”); in Experiment 2, infants saw and heard mispronunciations in which the altered phonem...

One of the most fundamental aspects of learning a language is determining the mappings between words and referents. An often-overlooked complication is that infants interact with multiple individuals who may not produce words in the same way. In the present study, we explored whether 10- to 12-month-olds can use talker-specific knowledge to infer t...