Naomi H Feldman

Biographic Data

ID6213101
NAMENaomi H Feldman
GIVEN NAMESNaomi H
FAMILY NAMEFeldman
SIGNATUREFELDMAN N H
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Maryland, College Park
ORCID0000-0001-9988-7497
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS7
TOTAL CITATIONS0
WORKS AS AUTHOR7
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2019
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX0

  • Mind the gap

    Open AccessLaurel Perkins, Naomi H Feldman et al.ARTICLELanguage2026

    In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix? , learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb ( what ) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency…

  • Exploring the effectiveness of reward-based learning strategies for second-language speech sounds

    Open AccessCraig A Thorburn, Ellen Lau et al.ARTICLEPsychonomic Bulletin & Review2025

  • Japanese children’s knowledge of the locality of zibun and kare

    Open AccessNaho Orita, Hajime Ono et al.ARTICLELanguage Acquisition2021

    Although the Japanese reflexive zibun can be bound both locally and across clause boundaries, the third-person pronoun kare cannot take a local antecedent. These are properties that children need to learn about their language, but we show that the direct evidence of the binding possibilities of zibun is sparse and the evidence of kare is absent in speech to children, leading us to ask about children’s knowledge. We show that children, unlike adul…

  • Do Infants Really Learn Phonetic Categories

    Open AccessNaomi H Feldman, Sharon Goldwater et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2021

    Early changes in infants' ability to perceive native and nonnative speech sound contrasts are typically attributed to their developing knowledge of phonetic categories. We critically examine this hypothesis and argue that there is little direct evidence of category knowledge in infancy. We then propose an alternative account in which infants' perception changes because they are learning a perceptual space that is appropriate to represent speech, …

  • Informativity, topicality, and speech cost

    Open AccessNaho Orita, Eliana Vornov et al.ARTICLEDiscourse Processes2021References: 51

    This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers' choices of referring expressions: the Topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the Rational model that chooses a form based on the informativity of the form and its speech cost

  • When context is and isn’t helpful

    Open AccessKasia Hitczenko, Reiko Mazuka et al.ARTICLEPsychonomic Bulletin & Review2020

  • Early phonetic learning without phonetic categories -- Insights from large-scale simulations on realistic input

    Thomas Schatz, Naomi Feldman et al.PREPRINT2019

    Before they even speak, infants become attuned to the sounds of the language(s) they hear, processing native phonetic contrasts more easily than non-native ones. For example, between 6-8 months and 10-12 months, infants learning American English get better at distinguishing English [ɹ] and [l], as in ‘rock’ vs ‘lock’, relative to infants learning Japanese. Influential accounts of this early phonetic learning phenomenon initially proposed that inf…