Variability's influence on language acquisition (VIOLA)
This is the home of my first post doc project (ending in 2017) where I wondered how speaker variability in the input might affect language acquisition in the first year(s) of life. Infants grow up in a multitude of environments and day-care situations and receive very different input. However, we usually consider monolingual babies a homogeneous group. We therefore assume that it does not matter how many people talk to them in their daily lives. Can we actually do that or do we need to take a closer look at the differences in their input?
First, why would you want to study this topic? I have written a blog post about it! I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on it. Further, my thesis contains computational modelling experiments that led me to conceive and reason about this project idea.
This space contains information about studies, progress, and presentations on the topic.
Papers in Theme 1: Infant studies
C. Bergmann & A. Cristia. "Environmental Influences on infants' native vowel discrimination: The case of talker number in daily life." Advance online publication in Infancy. doi: 10.1111/infa.12232
Papers in Theme 2: Modelling
C. Bergmann, A. Cristia, & E. Dupoux. "Discriminability of sound contrasts in the face of speaker variation quantified." In Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C. [Eds.] Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1331-1336. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
C. Bergmann, S. Tsuji, & A. Cristia. "Top-down versus bottom-up theories of phonological acquisition: A big data approach." Proceedings of Interspeech 2017, pp. 2013-2016.
DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1443
Papers in Theme 3: Meta-analyses
A. Black & C. Bergmann. "Quantifying infants' statistical word segmentation: A meta-analysis." Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 124-129, Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
Bergmann, C., Tsuji, S., Piccinini, P.E., Lewis, M.L., Braginsky, M., Frank, M.C., & Cristia, A. "Promoting replicability in developmental research through meta-analyses: Insights from language acquisition research." Accepted for publication in Child Development.
Selected Presentations and Posters at international conferences:
C. Bergmann & A. Cristia: Can more be better or is less more? Talker variability and native vowel discrimination in the first year of life presented at 40th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) in Boston, USA, on November 15th 2015
C. Bergmann & A. Cristia: The impact of speaker variability in daily life on native vowel discrimination in the first year presented at the 2016 International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) in New Orleans, USA on May 26-28 2016
C. Bergmann, A. Cristia, & E. Dupoux: Discriminability of sound contrasts in the face of speaker variation quantified presented at the 38th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) in Philadelphia, USA on August 11-13 2016
A. Black & C. Bergmann: Segmenting artificial languages in infancy: A meta-analytic view presented at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning in Bilbao, Spain on June 28-30, 2017
C. Bergmann, A. Cristia, & E. Dupoux: Quantifying structured variance in the signal across three large speech corpora presented at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) in Lyon, France on July 17-21 2017
A. Black & C. Bergmann: Quantifying infants' statistical word segmentation: A meta-analysis presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in London, UK on July 26-29 2017
C. Bergmann: Characterizing talker variability in everyday life of urban, high SES 4- to 12-month-olds presented at Many Paths to Language (MPaL) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands on October 6-8 2017
C. Bergmann & S. Tsuji: Everyday input variability affects word recognition at 11 but not 16 months presented at Many Paths to Language (MPaL) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands on October 6-8 2017
Deliverables (shared under CC-BY 4.0):
The input variability questionnaire: French long and short version; English long and short version.
If you want to use them, cite:
Bergmann, Christina (2016): VIOLA Input Questionnaires v1.0. figshare. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3144895
Collaborators: Alejandrina Cristia, Sho Tsuji, and Emmanuel Dupoux
Support:
This research was funded by an ERC Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Grant number 660911) titled VIOLA and before that I received funding for studies this project builds on by Fondation Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
At my lab, the LSCP, I also received institutional support from ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*
The wonderful babylab where I conducted the infant studies of this project is additionally supported by CNRS and EHESS