Peter W. Jusczyk
1948–2001
Richard N. Aslin
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
David B. Pisoni
Department of Psychology, Indiana University

Peter Jusczyk, Professor of Psychology and of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University, died unexpectedly on August 23, 2001, in Monterey, California, while attending a conference on cochlear implants, at which he gave the invited keynote address. Peter grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, and attended Brown University, where he graduated in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Notable among his achievements in a career that spanned more than 30 years was co-authorship, with Peter Eimas, Einar Siqueland, and James Vigorito, of a Science article that appeared in 1971. This seminal contribution demonstrated that infants as young as 1 month of age perceive subtle acoustic differences that differentiate the speech sounds /b/ and /p/. More important, the discriminative performance of infants was consistent with what is called categorical perception in adults: the ability to discriminate speech sounds only if they come from two different speech categories. Although subsequent work by Peter and his colleagues showed that categorical perception was not unique to speech, and that experience with a native language can alter initial (and presumably innate) perceptual categories, this Science article had a tremendous impact on the field of language acquisition and the study of infant perceptual abilities.

Peter received his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, where he worked with Deborah Kemler Nelson. His first academic position was at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he set up an infant sucking lab and conducted a variety of studies of speech sound discrimination in young infants. In 1980 he moved to the University of Oregon where he continued his studies of infant speech perception using both the sucking and head-turn preference techniques. A theme of this early work was the demonstration that categorical perception does not force the conclusion that speech sounds are perceived by a specialized speech processor. Based on work with one of us (David B. Pisoni), Peter showed that classes of sounds sharing acoustic properties with speech, but interpreted by adults as nonspeech, are nevertheless perceived categorically by infants. Although not denying the linguistic relevance of categorical perception, these nonspeech results suggested that a linguistic interpretation of speech may build on more rudimentary nonlinguistic mechanisms.

In the early 1980s, Peter realized that interpretations about the level of analysis at which infants perceive speech required cross-language comparisons. A sabbatical in 1981–1982 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, followed by a Fulbright Fellowship in Poland and a 2-year return to the CNRS, resulted in a series of studies of non-native speech perception with colleague Jacques Mehler. A new line of work, with collaborators Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Deborah Kemler Nelson, also emerged in this period, as Peter moved from simple speech contrasts to examine the prosodic aspects of linguistic materials. The head-turn preference procedure enabled Peter and his colleagues to document which prosodic patterns infants preferred to listen to (and by inference could discriminate from prosodic controls). Similar studies of musical structure, with Carol Krumhansl, suggested that certain prosodic patterns were recognized as familiar at an early age due to a combination of innate constraints and early experience.

In 1990 Peter moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo and soon thereafter focused his research on the mechanisms by which infants analyze the sound patterns of fluent speech. With European collaborators Anne Cutler, Angela Friederici, and Jacques Mehler, and Buffalo colleagues LouAnn Gerken, Paul Luce, Jan Charles-Luce, and James Sawusch, Peter explored how syllable stress and phonotactic constraints in the native language alter infants’ early listening preferences. With one of us (Richard N. Aslin), Peter developed a new variant of the head-turn preference procedure whereby brief exposure to a corpus of speech altered subsequent listening preferences for familiar versus novel test materials. This paradigm is now used extensively in labs around the world.

In 1996 Peter moved to the Johns Hopkins University, where his already prolific career blossomed into an unparalleled period of productivity. Over the past 5 years he authored 22 refereed journal articles and 22 book chapters or proceedings articles. Topics included the role of syllable stress and phonotactics in word segmentation, long-term memory for words, the learning of long-distance dependencies in morpheme sequences, the cocktail party phenomenon, the earliest linking of sounds to meanings, and the role of talker-specific information in word segmentation. Although Peter continued to collaborate with researchers in the United States (e.g., Scott Johnson, James Morgan, Paul Smolensky, Elizabeth Spelke) and Europe (e.g., Anne Cutler), the bulk of his recent work was conducted with a talented group of graduate students and postdoctoral students that he assembled at Hopkins. In addition, Peter’s wife Ann Marie served as his lab manager and collaborator on nearly all of his research over the past 15 years.

Over his career, Peter and his colleagues developed several theories about how speech categories are formed and how the sound patterns of words are extracted from fluent speech. These theories are summarized in the 1983 and 1998 review chapters that the three of us co-authored for the Mussen handbooks and in Peter’s sole authored book, The Discovery of Spoken Language, published in 1997. This latter book has become an instant classic in the field that every student of early language acquisition should read to learn about the remarkable progress made, in large part due to Peter’s program of research, since the Science article in 1971.

It will come as no surprise that Peter’s lab was well funded, with grants from ther National Institute of Child Health and Human Development totaling more than $5 million since 1981 and a 5-year Senior Scientist award from the National Institute of Mental Health. Peter had recently been honored by being appointed to the prestigious Society for Experimental Psychologists. But perhaps less visible was Peter’s service to the field, including a 5-year stint on a National Institutes of Health grant panel (with 3 years as chair) and membership on numerous editorial boards, including the journal Infancy. Equally important to the field was Peter’s all-encompassing interest in research on infancy in general and on language acquisition in particular, which was evident in his role as a reviewer, collaborator, and mentor. Before his unexpected death he was in the process of organizing a new professional society for the study of language development that would bring various scientists of different backgrounds and disciplines together in one organization.

For those who knew Peter, all of the foregoing accomplishments are merely a backdrop to the impact that he had on us as a person. We’ll miss the intense enthusiasm, the droll sense of humor, the passion for jazz, the love of wine, the gourmet meals, the jogs through conference cities, and the search for a good book. Although Peter’s life was far too short, he lived it to the fullest, and we know he’s at peace, riding his carbon fiber bike through France and rooting for the Red Sox to win the World Series.