• PhD, University of Toronto

By the time they reach the preschool period, most children speak in full sentences, and the building blocks of this skill are in place long before that. My research examines how children accomplish this. How do infants and toddlers learn to recognize words from fluent speech? How do they learn to process the relationships between words in a sentence? And, most importantly, how do children use this acquired linguistic knowledge during language processing in their daily lives? Ultimately, my work aims to provide a better understanding of the developmental trajectory of spoken language processing from infancy to adulthood.

• Van Heugten, M., Paquette-Smith, M., Krieger, D. R., & Johnson, E. K. (2018). Infants’ recognition of foreign-accented words: Flexible yet precise signal-to-word mapping strategies. Journal of Memory and Language, 100, 51-60.doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2018.01.003
• Van Heugten, M. & Johnson, E. K. (2017). Input matters: Multi-accent language exposure affects word form recognition in infancy. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 41(2), EL196-EL200. doi: 10.1121/1.4997604
• Brusini, P., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Van Heugten, M., De Carvalho, A., Goffinet, F., Fiévet, A.-C., & Christophe, A. (2017). Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study. Neuropsychologia, 98, 4-12. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.015
• Lev-Ari, S., Van Heugten, M., & Peperkamp, S. (2017). Relative difficulty of understanding foreign accents as a marker of language proficiency. Cognitive Science, 41(4), 1106-1118. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12394
• Van Heugten, M. & Johnson. E. K. (2016). Toddlers’ word recognition in an unfamiliar regional accent: The role of local sentence context and prior accent exposure. Language and Speech, 59(3), 353-363. doi: 10.1177/0023830915600471
• Van Heugten, M. & Christophe, A. (2015). Infants’ acquisition of grammatical gender dependencies. Infancy, 20(6), 675-683. doi: 10.1111/infa.12094
• Van Heugten, M., Bergmann, C., & Cristia, A. (2015). The effect of talker voice and accent in young children’s speech perception. In: S. Fuchs, D. Pape, C. Petrone, & P. Perrier (Eds.), Individual differences in speech production and perception. Berlin: Peter Lang Publisher, 57-88.
• Van Heugten, M., Krieger, D. R., & Johnson. E. K. (2015). The developmental trajectory of toddlers’ comprehension of unfamiliar regional accents. Language Learning and Development, 11(1), 41-65. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2013.879636
• Van Heugten, M. & Johnson. E. K. (2014). Learning to contend with accents in infancy: Benefits of brief speaker exposure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 430-450. doi: 10.1037/a0032192
• Van Heugten, M., Volkova, A., Trehub, S. E., & Schellenberg, E. G. (2014). Children’s recognition of spectrally degraded cartoon voices. Ear and Hearing, 35(1), 118-125. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0b013e3182a468d0
• Van Heugten, M. & Johnson, E. K. (2012). Infants exposed to fluent natural speech succeed at cross-gender word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 55(2), 554-560. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2011/10-0347)
• Van Heugten, M. & Johnson, E. K. (2011). Gender-marked articles help Dutch learners’ word recognition when gender information itself does not. Journal of Child Language, 38(1), 87-100.doi: 10.1017/S0205000909990146
• Van Heugten, M. & Johnson, E. K. (2010). Linking infants’ distributional learning abilities to natural language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(2), 197-209. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2010.04.001
• Van Heugten, M. & Shi, R. (2010). Infants’ sensitivity to non-adjacent dependencies across phonological phrase boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128(5), EL223-EL228. doi: 10.1121/1.3486197
• Van Heugten, M. & Shi, R. (2009). French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition. Developmental Science, 12(3), 419-425. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00788.x