Marieke van Heugten

Biographic Data

ID5887407
NAMEMarieke van Heugten
GIVEN NAMESMarieke
FAMILY NAMEvan Heugten
SIGNATUREVAN HEUGTEN M
AFFILIATIONSDepartment of Psychology, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA
ORCID0000-0002-4758-2314
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS8
TOTAL CITATIONS5
AUTHOR COUNT8
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2011
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • Verbs drive real-time object state representation during language processing in children under 3 years of age

    Boyang Qin, Marieke van HeugtenARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2026

    Adults’ language-mediated event representations are greatly constrained by verbs. However, it is unclear whether children use verb information in a similar fashion. Using the Looking While Listening paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test whether children between 32 and 36 months incorporate verb type and tense when representing object state during language processing. Children were shown images of an object in different states (e.g. an op…

  • Marginal contrast in loanword phonology

    Open AccessAlexander Martins, Alexander Martin et al.ARTICLELaboratory Phonology2022

    Though Dutch is usually described as lacking a voicing contrast at the velar place of articulation, due to intense language contact and heavy lexical borrowing, a contrast between /k/ and /g/ has recently been emerging. We explored the status of this contrast in Dutch speakers in both production and perception. We asked participants to produce loanwords containing a /g/ in the source language (e.g., goal) and found a range of productions, includi…

  • 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…

  • Relative Difficulty of Understanding Foreign Accents as a Marker of Proficiency

    Open AccessShiri Lev‐ari, Marieke van Heugten et al.ARTICLECognitive Science2016

    Foreign-accented speech is generally harder to understand than native-accented speech. This difficulty is reduced for non-native listeners who share their first language with the non-native speaker. It is currently unclear, however, how non-native listeners deal with foreign-accented speech produced by speakers of a different language. We show that the process of (second) language acquisition is associated with an increase in the relative difficu…

  • 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…

  • Infants' Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies

    Open AccessMarieke van Heugten, Anne Christophe et al.ARTICLEInfancy2015

    To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants' early sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where the article form is dictated by the noun's gender). This study therefore exa…

  • 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…

  • 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…