Elizabeth K Johnson

Biographic Data

ID3774034
NAMEElizabeth K Johnson
GIVEN NAMESElizabeth K
FAMILY NAMEJohnson
SIGNATUREJOHNSON E K
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Toronto
ORCID0000-0002-9941-9949
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS32
TOTAL CITATIONS26
AUTHOR COUNT32
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1991
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX3

  • The Quest for Truth

    Open AccessThomas St Pierre, Katherine S White et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2025

    Much of what children know about the world is learned from information provided by others, and children’s endorsement of this information depends on the social attributes of the person providing the information (e.g., their accent, attractiveness, etc.). Previous work on how the identity of a person providing information (i.e., informant) influences children’s learning has tended to focus on a highly specific, simplified learning context, where c…

  • It’s Hey Jude, not Hey Jade

    Open AccessHelen Buckler, Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2025

    A growing literature explores the representational detail of infants’ early lexical representations, but no study has investigated how exposure to real-life acoustic-phonetic variation impacts these representations. Indeed, previous experimental work with young infants has largely ignored the impact of accent exposure on lexical development. We ask how routine exposure to accent variation affects 6-month-olds’ ability to detect mispronunciations.…

  • Advancements in phonetics in the 21st century

    Open AccessElizabeth K Johnson, Katherine S WhiteARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2025References: 218

    Infant speech perception emerged as a field late in the 20th century. Early work focused on defining the initial state, and documenting the timecourse of changes in speech perception over the first year of life. At the turn of the century, attention shifted from studying when children became attuned to their native language, to asking how children achieved this transformation. Statistical learning became the dominant mechanism to explain language…

  • In Support of Varying Approaches to the Study of Variation

    Katherine S White, Thomas St Pierre et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2024

    The acquisition of variation is a fundamental – but poorly understood – part of child language acquisition. We fully endorse Shin and Miller’s call for us to recognize the importance of this core issue, and argue that our understanding could be further enriched by greater reliance on convergent methods. As such, we implore researchers to consider perception as well as production data, and to consider acquisition across different domains and diffe…

  • Not gone away

    Open AccessMartin D Owens, Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLECritical Perspectives on…2024

    Purpose The paper aims to understand how state and non-state domestic terrorism impacts MNEs in foreign markets. Despite the burgeoning literature on terrorism within international business (IB), most research has focused on international terrorism, or terrorism generally. Consequently, there has been limited research examining how domestic or local based terrorism impacts foreign firms. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual paper. Fin…

  • The Influence of Accent Distance on Perceptual Adaptation in Toddlers and Adults

    Angela Cooper, Melissa Paquette-Smith et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2023

    Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener’s native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker’s accent and a listener’s native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three artificial accents (Near, Far, and Farther), varying in the number and magnitude of pronunciation deviations…

  • Cross-generational Phonetic Alignment between Mothers and Their Children

    Thomas St Pierre, Angela Cooper et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2022

    Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon – known as phonetic alignment – has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns in intergenerational, adult-child dyads. In the current study, we investigated alignment between mothers…

  • Showing strength through flexibility

    Open AccessSuzanne V H Van Der Feest, Mary Carman Rose et al.ARTICLEBrain and Language2022

  • Comparing Phonetic Convergence in Children and Adults

    Open AccessMelissa Paquette‐Smith, Jessamyn Schertz et al.ARTICLELanguage and Speech2022Cited by: 4References: 45

    Observations by sociolinguists suggest that when children relocate to a new community, they rapidly learn to imitate their peers, adopting the new local accent faster and more effectively than adults. However, few well-controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted comparing speech or accent imitation across ages. Here, we investigated Canadian English-speaking children’s and adults’ imitation of three model speakers: a Canadian English ta…

  • The Potential for a ‘Tiger King Effect’

    Open AccessNikki Bennett, Elizabeth Johnson et al.ARTICLENetworking Knowledge Journal of…2021

    During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Netflix aired the docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. This aligned with the United States declaring a national emergency and the beginning of stay-at-home orders. Netflixexperienced a significant increase in viewership and a large number of responses to Tiger King’s content from viewers and media outlets (e.g., Stoll 2021). In this article, we present an analysis of social media responses on t…

  • Targeted adaptation in infants following live exposure to an accented talker

    Open AccessMelissa Paquette-Smith, Melissa Paquette‐Smith et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2021

    Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3). After video-based exposure, Canadian English-learning 15- to 18-month-olds failed to recognize familiar …

  • Navigating Accent Variation

    Elizabeth K Johnson, Marieke van Heugten et al.ARTICLEAnnual Review of Linguistics2021Cited by: 2References: 8

    Adult processing of other-accented speech is fast, dependent on lexical access, and readily generalizable to new words. But what does children's processing of other-accented speech look like? Although many acquisition researchers have emphasized how other-accented speech presents a formidable challenge to young children, we argue that the field has perhaps underestimated children's early accent processing abilities. In support of this view, we pr…

  • Resolving the (Apparent) Talker Recognition Paradox in Developmental Speech Perception

    Open AccessNatalie Fecher, Melissa Paquette‐Smith et al.ARTICLEInfancy2019

    The infant literature suggests that humans enter the world with impressive built‐in talker processing abilities. For example, newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice over the sound of another woman's voice, and well before their first birthday, infants tune in to language‐specific speech cues for distinguishing between unfamiliar talkers. The early childhood literature, however, suggests that preschoolers are unable to learn to identify…

  • The effect of accent exposure on children’s sociolinguistic evaluation of peers

    Melissa Paquette-Smith, Melissa Paquette‐Smith et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2019Cited by: 6References: 1

    Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of children's accent-based group preferences. In three experiments, we examine the development of accent-based frien…

  • What infant-directed speech tells us about the development of compensation for assimilation

    Open AccessHelen Buckler, Huiwen Goy et al.ARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2018Cited by: 3References: 63

  • I Don't Like the Tone of Your Voice

    Open AccessMelissa Paquette‐Smith, Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLEInfancy2016

    Infants can make social judgments about characters by visually observing their interactions with others (e.g., Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, Nature , 2007, 450 , 557). Here, we ask whether infants can form similar judgments about potential social partners based solely on their tone of voice. In Experiment 1, we presented 10.5‐month‐olds with two visually neutral puppets. One puppet spoke in a positive affect and the other spoke in a negative affect. When…

  • Toddlers’ Word Recognition in an Unfamiliar Regional Accent

    Open AccessMarieke van Heugten, Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLELanguage and Speech2016Cited by: 3References: 35

    Adults are generally adept at recognizing familiar words in unfamiliar accents. However, studies testing young children’s abilities to cope with accent-related variation in the speech signal have generated mixed results, with some work emphasizing toddlers’ early competence and other work focusing more on their long-lasting difficulties in this domain. Here, we set out to unify these two perspectives and propose that task demands may play a cruci…

  • Estimating the Development Assistance for Health Provided to Faith-Based Organizations, 1990–2013

    Open AccessAnnie Haakenstad, Elizabeth Johnson et al.ARTICLEPLoS ONE2015

    BACKGROUND: Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have been active in the health sector for decades. Recently, the role of FBOs in global health has been of increased interest. However, little is known about the magnitude and trends in development assistance for health (DAH) channeled through these organizations. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Data were collected from the 21 most recent editions of the Report of Voluntary Agencies. These reports provide inform…

  • Constructing a Proto-Lexicon

    Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLEAnnual Review of Linguistics2015Cited by: 2References: 11

    Infants begin learning the phonological structure of their native language remarkably early and use this information to extract word-sized chunks from the speech signal. While acquiring the language-specific segmentation strategies appropriate for their native language, infants are simultaneously beginning to form word–object pairings and learning which sound contrasts are meaningful in the native language. They are also working out how to assign…

  • Global, regional, and national incidence and mortality for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria during 1990–2013

    Open AccessChristopher J L Murray, Katrina F Ortblad et al.ARTICLEThe Lancet2014

  • The Developmental Trajectory of Toddlers’ Comprehension of Unfamiliar Regional Accents

    Marieke van Heugten, Dena Krieger et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2014

    Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of toddlers’ comprehension of unfamiliar regional accents. Experiments 1 and 2 reveal that Canadian-English-learn…

  • How yellow is your banana? Toddlers' language-mediated visual search in referent-present tasks

    Nikolaus Mani, Nivedita Mani et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2013Cited by: 3References: 3

    What is the relative salience of different aspects of word meaning in the developing lexicon? The current study examines the time-course of retrieval of semantic and color knowledge associated with words during toddler word recognition: At what point do toddlers orient toward an image of a yellow cup upon hearing color-matching words such as "banana" (typically yellow) relative to unrelated words (e.g., "house")? Do children orient faster to sema…

  • Gender-marked determiners help Dutch learners' word recognition when gender information itself does not

    Open AccessMarieke van Heugten, Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLEJournal of Child Language2011

    Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use articles during sentence comprehension in a fashion comparable to similarly aged English learners. Tha…

  • Question or tone 2? How language experience and linguistic function guide pitch processing

    Open AccessBettina Braun, Elizabeth K JohnsonARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2011Cited by: 3References: 56

  • Developmental Changes in Infants’ Ability to Cope with Dialect Variation in Word Recognition

    Open AccessRachel Schmale, Alejandrina Cristia et al.ARTICLEInfancy2010

    Toward the end of their first year of life, infants’ overly specified word representations are thought to give way to more abstract ones, which helps them to better cope with variation not relevant to word identity (e.g., voice and affect). This developmental change may help infants process the ambient language more efficiently, thus enabling rapid gains in vocabulary growth. One particular kind of variability that infants must accommodate is tha…