Seminars

Online measures of word recognition such as eyetracking have revolutionized the way we understand phonological processing in young children. However, most work in this area has only tested listeners exposed to a single dialect of a single language. In this talk I will discuss the influence of natural exposure to multiple dialects - with different distributions of phonological contrasts - on toddler’s online word recognition. Contrary to some earlier reports, we find no evidence that exposure to multiple language varieties has long-lasting detrimental effects on toddler’s word recognition efficiency. We take a glass- is-half-full view to explaining the impact of multi-accent exposure on development: We suggest that previously reported effects of accent exposure could be best captured in a developmental framework where children by 2 years of age have developed speech processing strategies best suited for their environment, and are adept at flexibly handling accents beyond a socially dominant language variety.

The evolution of vocal learning — an important component of speech and language development — in theory allows for increased communicative flexibility, compared with animals whose vocalizations are not learned. Songbirds, the most species-rich group of vocal learners, exhibit great diversity in terms of song structure and processes of inheritance. Relatively little is known about songbird vocal interactions — or how birds may learn how to sing (as opposed to simply what). In this talk, I describe research examining the vocal interactions of the dominant laboratory songbird, the male zebra finch. I show that while zebra finch song has been productively exploited for its simplicity and stereotypy as a model of sensorimotor learning and control, these gregarious, nonterritorial animals possess complex vocal repertoires that are dynamically expressed in social interactions, reminiscent of alignment phenomena that pervade human communication at multiple linguistic levels. I argue that a comparative-species perspective can offer new insights into the emergence of dynamic communication during development.

Online measures of word recognition such as eyetracking have revolutionized the way we understand phonological processing in young children. However, most work in this area has only tested listeners exposed to a single dialect of a single language. In this talk I will discuss the influence of natural exposure to multiple dialects - with different distributions of phonological contrasts - on toddler’s online word recognition. Contrary to some earlier reports, we find no evidence that exposure to multiple language varieties has long-lasting detrimental effects on toddler’s word recognition efficiency. We take a glass-is-half-full view to explaining the impact of multi-accent exposure on development: We suggest that previously reported effects of accent exposure could be best captured in a developmental framework where children by 2 years of age have developed speech processing strategies best suited for their environment, and are adept at flexibly handling accents beyond a socially dominant language variety.

In this talk, I describe a model trained to represent conversational dynamics by predicting prosodic and language output based on autoregressive input from the target speaker and their interlocutor. Separate attention mechanisms for each speaker allow us to examine which of the interlocutor's turns are considered influential for the prediction of a target turn. Using this novel approach, we formulate and evaluate several hypotheses about how a speaker's conversational speech influences that of their interlocutor (often called “entrainment”), and discuss how these attention scores can be used to sketch the discourse structure of a dialogue. These findings extend previous work on entrainment by expanding the hypothesis space to search for nonlocal and nonlinear dynamics.

Laboratory experiments from the early 1970s to the 1990s set much of the agenda for infant speech perception research to the present day, emphasizing infants’ cognitive skills and using theoretical tools given by the cognitive psychology of perceptual categorization. I will argue that it is time to reconsider. Infants are both more and less competent than we once thought. Even more important, parental speech does not appear to have the properties required and presupposed by the usual “statistical learning” accounts of category learning and word-form discovery. I will defend these points and propose that we should use different intuitions in contemplating the infant’s path toward language understanding. In particular, we should try to imagine the infant’s organic path, rather than setting the infant targets from the mature language.

The concept of cognitive reserve posits that there are brain mechanisms that allow some people to cope better than others with age-or disease-related brain changes. There are a set of life experiences that seem to be associated with greater ability to cope with brain changes. In addition research has explored differential task related activation as a potential moderator between brain change in cognition. This talk will review studies that helped develop and that support this concept, including those using epidemiologic and functional imaging approaches. I hope that we can discuss the special role that language might play in these relationships.