Matt Hilton

• PhD
• Lecturer at Maastricht University

Children show the first signs of word recognition as young as 6 months and produce their first words at around a year. Word learning then proceeds rapidly, despite the complexity of determining what a word refers to and the challenge of learning and using words in new contexts. How children solve this puzzle is the focus of some debate, and several...

This study set out to examine whether shyness, an aversion to novelty and unfamiliar social situations, can affect the processes that underlie early word learning. Twenty-four-month-old children ( n =32) were presented with sets of one novel and two familiar objects, and it was found that shyer children were less likely to select a novel object as...

The current study tests the hypothesis that shy children's reduced word learning is partly due to an effect of shyness on attention during object labeling. A sample of 20-and 26-month-old children (N = 32) took part in a looking-while-listening task in which they saw sets of familiar and novel objects while hearing familiar or novel labels. Overall...

Speech and action sequences are continuous streams of information that can be segmented into sub-units. In both domains, this segmentation can be facilitated by perceptual cues contained within the information stream. In speech, prosodic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary lengthening, and pitch rise) mark boundaries between words and phrases, while...

Previous work has found that shy children show chance‐level disambiguation and retention of novel word meanings in a typical lab‐based word learning task. This effect could be explained in terms of shy children's aversion to unfamiliarity disrupting the requisite attentional processes, because the task is marked by a high degree of unfamiliarity. T...

Previous research has shown that shyness affects children's attention during the fast-mapping of novel words via disambiguation. The current study examined whether shyness also affects children's attention when eye-gaze cues to novel word meanings are present. 20-to 26-month-old children's (N = 31) gaze was recorded as they viewed videos in which a...

Human infants can segment action sequences into their constituent actions already during the first year of life. However, work to date has almost exclusively examined the role of infants’ conceptual knowledge of actions and their outcomes in driving this segmentation. The present study examined electrophysiological correlates of infants’ processing...

The current thesis examined individual differences that can impact on the disambiguation and learning of novel word meanings, focusing on the effects of shyness, defined as an aversion to novelty in social situations (Putnam, Gartstein & Rothbart, 2006). A systematic pattern of attention during labeling is crucial in supporting children's novel wor...

Because both heard language and observed action consist of continuous streams of to-be-processed information, they provide similar challenges to the listener/observer with respect to identifying and discriminating meaningful segments (e.g., phrases / actions). In the language domain, prosodic boundary cues (e.g., preboundary pitch-change, lengtheni...