Katherine S White

Biographic Data

ID3774449
NAMEKatherine S White
GIVEN NAMESKatherine S
FAMILY NAMEWhite
SIGNATUREWHITE K S
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Waterloo
ORCID0000-0003-2631-7711
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS13
TOTAL CITATIONS19
AUTHOR COUNT13
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1942
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Impact of Phonological Biases on Mispronunciation Sensitivity and Novel Accent Adaptation

    Katie Von Holzen, Sandrien van Ommen et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2023

    Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers’ lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers…

  • When it’s not appropriate to adapt

    Open AccessKatherine S White, Olivia DaubARTICLEBrain and Language2021

  • Toddlers link social and speech variation during word learning

    Drew Weatherhead, Katherine S WhiteARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2021Cited by: 1

    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 vowels differed systematically. One talker trained them on a word-referent mapping. At test, toddlers sa…

  • That’s thee, uuh blicket! How does disfluency affect children’s word learning

    Open AccessKatherine S White, Elizabeth S Nilsen et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2020

    Disfluencies, such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’, can cause adults to attribute uncertainty to speakers, but may also facilitate speech processing. To understand how these different functions affect children’s learning, we asked whether (dis)fluency affects children’s decision to select information from speakers (an explicit behavior) and their learning of specific words (an implicit behavior). In Experiment 1a, 31 3- to 4-year-olds heard two puppets provide f…

  • Preschoolers are sensitive to accent distance

    Open AccessDrew Weatherhead, Ori Friedman et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2019

    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 accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, …

  • 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…

  • Sub-segmental detail in early lexical representations

    Open AccessKatherine S White, James L MorganARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2008

  • Receptive Grammatical Knowledge of Familiar Content Words and Inflection in 16‐Month‐Olds

    Open AccessMelanie Soderstrom, Katherine S White et al.ARTICLEInfancy2007

    This study examines 16‐month‐olds' understanding of word order and inflectional properties of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical sentences when the ungrammaticality was cued by both misplaced inflection and word order reversal of nouns and verbs. Infants were also sensitive to inflection alone as a cue to grammaticality, but not word order alone. The preference for grammatical sentence forms was a…

  • A Statistical Basis for Speech Sound Discrimination

    Open AccessJennifer L Anderson, James L Morgan et al.ARTICLELanguage and Speech2003Cited by: 12References: 43

    Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenome non agree that the decline indiscrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic categories. The goal of this study was to evaluate the role of input statistics in learning these categories…

  • A Subtreasury of American Humor

    Richard M Dorson, E B White et al.ARTICLEThe New England Quarterly1942