
C03
Effects of variable input on word learning and word recognition in infants
PI(s): Prof. Dr. Barbara Höhle & Prof. Dr. Adamantios Gafos
Spoken language does not provide a one-to-one relation between properties of the acoustic signal and abstract symbolic representations. This raises the question of how infants can detect the lexically relevant phonetic dimensions in their speech input. This project evaluates the hypothesis that acoustic variability is essential for the establishment of stability in phonemic categories during language development. We will pursue this hypothesis by considering the effects of different types of variability on word learning and speech perception, taking into account data-driven learning mechanisms that support the lexical development in the individual.
Members



Marc Hullebus
Universität PotsdamCampus GolmDepartment LinguistikKarl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, Haus 14, Raum 3.2814476 Potsdam(+49) 331 977-2374 | 📧

Dr. phil. Alan Langus
Universität PotsdamCampus GolmDepartment LinguistikKarl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, Haus 14, Raum 2.3714476 Potsdam(+49) 331 977-2916 | 📧
Publications
Author(s) | Title | Year | Published in | DOI | Links | Type |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Höhle, B., Fritzsche, T., Mess, K., Philipp, M. & Gafos, A. | Only the right noise? Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14-month-olds' minimal pair word learning. | 2020 | Developmental Science, 23(5), e12950. | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R. & Nazzi, T. | Variability and stability in early language acquisition: Comparing monolingual and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition. | 2019 | Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(1), 56-71. | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
Boll-Avetisyan, N., Bhatara, A. & Höhle, B. | Processing of Rhythm in Speech and Music in Adult Dyslexia. | 2020 | Brain Sciences, 10(5), 261. | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
Höhle, B., Fritzsche, T., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Hullebus, M. & Gafos, A. I. | Respect the surroundings: Effects of phonetic context variability on infants' learning of minimal pairs. | 2021 | Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: Express Letters, 1(2), 024401. | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
Tobin, S., Hullebus, M. & Gafos, A. I. | Immediate phonetic convergence in a cue-distractor paradigm. | 2018 | The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(6), EL528. | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
Hullebus, M., Tobin, S. & Gafos, A. | Speaker-specific structure in German voiceless stop voice onset times. | 2018 | Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp.1403-1407). Hyderabad, India. | Link | Other | |
Bhatara, A., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Höhle, B. & Nazzi, T. | Early sensitivity and acquisition of prosodic patterns at the lexical level. | 2018 | N. Esteve-Gibert & P. Prieto (Eds.), The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition (pp. 37-57). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. | Link | SFB-Related | |
Boll-Avetisyan, N. | The role of phonological structure in speech segmentation by infants and adults: a review and methodological considerations. | 2018 | C. Ulbrich, A. Werth, & R. Wiese (Eds.), Empirical Approaces to the Phonological Structure of Words (pp. 213-240). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter. | Link | SFB-Related | |
Boll-Avetisyan, N., Nixon, J., Lentz, T., Liu, L., van Ommen, S., Coltekin, C. & van Rij, J. | Neural response development during distributional learning. | 2018 | Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp.1432-1436). Hyderabad, India. | Link | SFB-Related | |
Junge, C., Boll-Avetisyan, N. & Benders, T. | Speech Perception and discrimination: from sounds to words. | 2019 | In J. Horst & J. von Koss Torkildsen (Eds.), International Handbook of Language Acquisition (pp. 153-172). New York: Routledge. | SFB-Related | ||
Nixon, J., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Lentz, T.O., van Ommen, S., Keij, B., Çöltekin, Ç., Liu, L. & van Rij, J. | Short-term exposure enhances perception of both between- and within-category acoustic information. | 2018 | Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018 (pp. 114-118). | Link | SFB-Related | |
Boll-Avetisyan, N. | How short-term exposure alters the sensitivity to a non-native phonetic contrast: Novel insights from ERP and behavioral measures. | 2018 | Invited talk at the Linguistisches Kolloquium, Phillips-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany. 05 December. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Determinants of variability and consistency in prosody perception. | 2018 | Invited talk at the Linguistisches Kolloquium, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany. 28 November. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Boll-Avetisyan, N. | We got the beat: The role of innate biases and input factors in prosody acquisition. | 2018 | Invited talk at the 40. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft. Kurz AG 14: Variable perception and production correlates for word stress in first language acquisition and child second language learning, Stuttgart, Germany. 07 - 09 March. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Early infancy predictors of later language performance. | 2017 | Invited talk at the Exploratory Workshop on Early Language Assessment, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. 11 - 14 September. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Boll-Avetisyan, N. & Fritzsche, T. | Segmentation of vowel-initial words from continuous speech in infancy. | 2018 | Poster presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS 2018 - Building Bridges), Philadelphia, PA, USA. 30 June - 03 July. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Boll-Avetisyan, N., Fritzsche, T. & Jäkel, C. | Recognition of vowel-initial words in continuous speech at 11 months: Evidence from German. | 2017 | Paper presented at the 2nd Lancaster International Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD 2017), Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. 23 - 25 August. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Boll-Avetisyan, N., van Ommen, S., Nazzi, T. & Höhle, B. | Lexical stress discrimination by simultaneous and late bilinguals. | 2018 | Poster presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism and Cognition 2018, Birla Institute of Technology & Science Pilani - KK Birla Campus Goa, Goa, India. 01 - 03 November. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Boll-Avetisyan, N., van Ommen, S., Nazzi, T. & Höhle, B. | Categorical perception of lexical stress in French L2 learners of German: Effects of musical acuity. | 2018 | Poster presented at the 43rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, USA. 02 - 04 November. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Boll-Avetisyan, N., van Ommen, S., Nazzi, T. & Höhle, B. | Stress “deafness” can be overcome: Evidence from Second language learners. | 2018 | Paper presented at the 28th Conference of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA 2018), Münster, Germany. 05 - 08 September. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Boll-Avetisyan, N., van Ommen, S., Nazzi, T. & Höhle, B. | Categorical perception of lexical stress by simultaneous and late bilinguals. | 2018 | Paper presented at the LabPhon16 - Variation, development and impairment: Between phonetics and phonology, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 19 - 22 June. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Brown, J. M. M. & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Artificial language learning experiments for testing the learnability of possible and impossible syntactic structures and previous exposure bias. | 2019 | Paper presented at the 3rd RTANJ-Workshop, Rtanj Mountain, Serbia. 04-07 July. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Dimitriadis, A., Boll-Avetisyan, N. & Fritzsche, T. | Measuring the learnability of morphological paradigms: An experimental study. | 2017 | Paper presented at the Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Linguistic Theory (CIALT-1), University of Crete, Rethymnon, Greece. 06 - 08 October. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Dimitriadis, A., Boll-Avetisyan, N. & Fritzsche, T. | An experimental study of the learnability advantage of agglutinative over fusional morphology. | 2017 | Paper presented at the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Zurich, Switzerland. 10 - 13 September. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Fritzsche, T., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Hullebus, M., Gafos, A. I. & Höhle, B. | How brief exposure to varying phonetic contexts can enhance minimal pair word learning in 14-month-old children. | 2020 | Poster presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (vICIS), Glasgow, Scotland, UK. 06-09 July. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Fritzsche, T., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Hullebus, M., Gafos, A. I. & Höhle, B. | Give me more! Increasing relevant acoustic variability aids 14-month-old children in learning minimal pairs. | 2020 | Poster presented at the 17th Biennial conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon17), Vancouver, Canada. 06-08 July. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Fritzsche, T., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Markmann, E., Gafos, A. I. & Höhle, B. | The facilitative effect of phonetic context variability on early word learning: A habituation study with 14-month-old children. | 2020 | Poster presented at the 10th Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD), Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. 09-11 January. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Fritzsche, T., Gafos, A. I. & Höhle, B. | Is any type of input variability beneficial for mapping novel words to objects in 14-month-old infants? | 2018 | Paper presented at the 3rd Lancaster International Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD 2018), Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. 05 - 07 September. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Fritzsche, T., Gafos, A. I. & Höhle, B. | The beneficial role of variability for acquiring novel words: A habituation study with 14-month-old German-learning children. | 2018 | Poster presented at the LabPhon16 - Variation, development and impairment: Between phonetics and phonology, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 19 - 22 June. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Höhle, B. | Phonological information in language development and language processing: How to find phonological stability in a sea of sound. | 2017 | Invited talk at the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descatres, Paris, France. March | Talk or Presentation | ||
Höhle, B., Fritzsche, T. & Gafos, A. I. | Input variability in learning novel object-label pairs: How specific are beneficial effects? | 2018 | Poster presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS 2018 - Building Bridges), Philadelphia, PA, USA. 30 June - 03 July. | Paper | Talk or Presentation | |
Hullebus, M., Tobin, S. J. & Gafos, A. | Speaker-specific structure in German voiceless stop voice onset times. | 2018 | Paper presented at the Interspeech 2018, Hyderabad, India. 02 - 06 September. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Omane, P. O. & Höhle, B. | Acquiring Syntactic Variability: The Production of Wh-Questions in Children and Adults Speaking Akan. | 2021 | Frontiers in Communication, 6. | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
Marimon, M., Höhle, B. & Langus, A. | Pupillary entrainment reveals individual differences in cue weighting in 9-month-old German-learning infants. | 2022 | Cognition, 224, 105054. | Link | Peer-Reviewed | |
Höhle, B. | Not only noise: effects of acoustic variability on the development of phonological categories in early language acquisition. | 2022 | Invited talk at the Workshop "Hearing and Linguistics", Carl-von-Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg, Germany. 13-14 May. | Talk or Presentation | ||
Fanselow, G., Zimmermann, M. & Philipp, M. | Accessing the availability of inverse scope in German in the covered box paradigm | 2022 | Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 7(1). | Link | Paper | Peer-Reviewed |
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