About

Toben H. Mintz is a Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as the Director of the Cognitive Science Program and the Language Development Lab. His general research interests focus on the cognitive mechanisms underlying language acquisition. His ongoing and completed projects investigate how infants detect words in fluent speech, how infants and very young children acquire fundamental syntactic knowledge about the language they are learning, and how toddlers learn the meanings of novel words. These research programs are connected by a common question about the nature of the mechanisms that give rise to linguistic abilities and the effects of environmental input on these mechanisms. Professor Mintz's work aims to understand the processes that facilitate language learning in early development. He is involved in guiding graduate students through research in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences area or the Developmental area of the Psychology Department, and he also accepts students through the Linguistics Department and the Neuroscience Graduate Program, with which he has affiliations. His lab's website is dornsife.usc.edu/langdevlab, and his office is located at 3620 McClintock Ave., Department of Psychology, SGM 501, University of Southern California.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Cognitive psychology
• Communication
• Chemistry
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Dynamic Action Facilitates Learning of Non-Adjacent Dependencies in Visual Sequences

  Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society · 2021 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  Many events that humans and other organisms experience contain regularities in which certain elements within an event predict certain others. While some of these regularities involve tracking the co-occurrences between temporarily adjacent stimuli, others involve tracking the co-occurrences between temporarily distant stimuli (i.e., non-adjacent dependencies, NADs). Prior research shows robust learning of adjacent dependencies in humans and other species, whereas learning NADs is more difficult, and often requires support from properties of the stimulus to help learners notice the NADs. Here we report on four experiments that examined NAD learning from various types of visual stimuli. The results suggest that continuous movements aid the acquisition of NADs. We also found that human motion leads to more robust NAD learning compared to object motions, perhaps because of a richer representation. This richer representation could result in better memory and recall, and provide a stronger signal for NAD learning.

Frequent coauthors

• Hao Wang

  1 shared

• Liudvikas Bukys

  1 shared

• Jason D. Zevin

  University of Southern California

  1 shared

• Nigel Goddard

  University of Edinburgh

  1 shared

• Calvin Leather

  1 shared

• Kenton J. Lynne

  IBM (United States)

  1 shared

• Helen Shiyang Lu

  University of Southern California

  1 shared

Labs

• Language Development LabPI

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