Daniel Swingley
Professor of Psychology
How do infants begin to learn languages?
Professor Daniel Swingley is a psycholinguist who studies language acquisition.
Some of the fundamental questions that Professor Swingley is interested in include:
- How do children learn the consonants and vowels of their language?
- How do children learn words?
- How does parental speech to children support language learning?
- What individual differences lead to differences in speech interpretation?
He has explored these questions through observational experiments with infants and toddlers, phonetic and statistical analyses of infant-directed speech corpora, and learning studies of adults.
Professor Swingley was recently awarded The Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Penn’s highest teaching honor, in 2016.
Daniel Swingley
Professor of Psychology
Selected Publications
Swingley, D., & Alarcon, C. (2018). Lexical learning may contribute to phonetic learning in infants: a corpus analysis of maternal Spanish. Cognitive Science, 42, 1618-1641, 10.1111/cogs.12620.
Swingley, D., & Humphrey, C. (2018). Quantitative linguistic predictors of infants’ learning of specific English words. Child Development, 89, 1247-1267, 10.1111/cdev.12731.
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2017). Young infants’ word comprehension given an unfamiliar talker or altered pronunciations. Child Development. 10.1111/cdev.12888