Collaborative Research Centre 1287 Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational, and Grammatical Aspects

C07

Limits of variability in phonotactic acquisition due to universal biases

PI(s): Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan

This project aims at disentangling to what extent phonotactic acquisition is experience-dependent, leading to variability across infants with different language experiences (learning different or multiple languages), and to what extent experience-independent universal biases might place a limit on this acquisition. To this end, we will compare infants growing up mono- or bilingually with German and/or Russian, two phonotactically distinct languages. We will conduct corpus-based lexical statistics to understand what phonotactic input the infants receive, and eye-tracking experiments to test whether the infants’ phonotactic listening preferences are shaped by universal biases beyond their language experience conditions.

Members

no photoProf. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan
Universität PotsdamCampus GolmHaus 14, Raum 2.38
no photo Leonardo Piot
Universität PotsdamCampus GolmHaus 14, Raum 3.28

Publications

  • Peer-Reviewed: Papers, Journals, Books, Articles of the CRC
  • Talk or Presentation: Talks, Presentations, Posters of the CRC
  • SFB-Related: not produced in connection with the CRC, but are thematically appropriate
  • Other: Papers, Journals, Books, Articles of the CRC, but not peer-reviewed
Types of Publications
Author(s)TitleYearPublished inTypeLinks
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Infant-directed speech might be tailored for learning phonotactics.2022Paper presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (XXIII ICIS - Developmental Cascades), Ottawa, Canada. 07 - 10 July.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Infant-directed speech might be tailored for learning phonotactic principles.2022Paper presented at the 18th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (Online). 23 - 25 June, 2022.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Infant-directed speech supports phonotactic learning in German.2022Paper presented at the Workshop on Infant Language Development, San Sebastián, Spain. 09 - 11 June, 2022.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., Roeser, J., & Kidd, E.Online data collection to address language sampling bias: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.2022Linguistics Vanguard. DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2021-0040Peer-Reviewed
Piot, L., Nazi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic regularities related to perceptually low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study.2024Frontiers in Psychology, 15. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1367240Peer-Reviewed
Aravena-Bravo, P., Cristia, A., Garcia, R., Kotera, H., Kunene Nicolas, R., Laranjo, R., Arokoyo, B., Benavides, S., Benders, T., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Cychosz, M., Dal Ben, R., Diop, Y., Durán-Urzúa, C., Havron, N., Manalili, M., Narasimhan, B., Omane, P., Rowland, C., Kolberg, L., Ssemata, A., Styles, S., Troncoso-Acosta, B., & Woon, F.Towards diversifying early language development research: First Truly Global International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 20212023Journal of Cognition and Development DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2023.2231083Peer-Reviewed
Garcia, R., Langus, A., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Infants’ sensitivity to sonority sequencing: evidence from behavior and pupillary synchronization.2024Paper presented at the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2024), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 19-21 June.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., Lu, Y., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Limits of variability in infant phonotactic acquisition: A study on the sonority sequencing principle.2023Poster presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL) 2023, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 25-27 October.Talk or Presentation
Omane, P.O., Boll-Avetisyan, N., & Benders, T.Multilingual infants in Ghana’s ability to use tongue root harmony cues for word segmentation in Akan2024Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIV ICIS), Glasgow, UK. 08 - 11 July.Talk or Presentation
Omane, P.O., Boll-Avetisyan, N., & Benders, T.Does exposure to tongue root harmony and non-vowel harmony languages affect perceptual preferences in infants growing up in Africa? Data from multilingual infants in Ghana2023Paper presented at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL54), University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA. 12-14 June.Talk or Presentation
Omane, P.O., Boll-Avetisyan, N., & Benders, T.How do multilingual infants in Ghana use vowel harmony cues for word segmentation? Effects of exposure to harmonic and non-harmonic languages2023Paper presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB14), Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. 26-30 June. Talk or Presentation
Omane, P.O., Benders, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Effects of multilingual exposure to harmonic and non-harmonic languages on perceptual preferences in infants growing up in Africa2022Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIII ICIS - Developmental Cascades), Ottawa, Canada. 07 - 10 July.Talk or Presentation
Omane, P.O., Benders, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Tongue Root harmony acquisition and word segmentation in multilingual infant learners of languages with and without vowel harmony2023Paper presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL 2023), Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 25-27 October.Talk or Presentation
Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Infants’ phonotactic sensitivities to regularities involving low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study.2024Paper presented at the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2024), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 19-21 June. Talk or Presentation
Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Auditory phonotactic wellformedness intuitions depend on the nativeness of a speaker’s pronunciation.2024Paper presented at the Linguistic Evidence 2024, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany. 22-23 February.Talk or Presentation
Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Wordlikeness intuitions depend on the nativeness of a speaker’s pronunciation.2024Paper presented at the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19 - Where speech sounds meet the architecture of the grammar and beyond), Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. 27 - 29 June.Talk or Presentation
Piot, L., Van Ommen, S., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Schmandt, S., & Nazzi, T.The consonant-bias is influenced by syllabic position in a familiar word recognition conflict task, a cross-linguistic study of German- and French-learning toddlers.2024Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIV ICIS), Glasgow, UK. 08 - 11 July.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Phonetic discrimination in Tagalog-learning infants: Testing the influence of acoustic salience.2024Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIV ICIS), Glasgow, UK. 08 - 11 July. Talk or Presentation
Barrios, A., & Garcia, R.Filipino Children’s Acquisition of Nominal and Verbal Markers in L1 and L2 Tagalog.2023Languages, 8(3), 188. DOI: 10.3390/languages8030188Peer-Reviewed
Garcia, R., Roeser, J., & Kidd, E.Finding your voice: Voice-specific effects in Tagalog reveal the limits of word order priming.2023Cognition, 236, 105424. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105424Peer-Reviewed
Pizarro-Guevara, J. S., & Garcia, R.Philippine Psycholinguistics.2024Annual Review of Linguistics, 10, 145-167. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031522-102844Peer-Reviewed
Garcia, R., Albert, H. M. D., Bondoc, I. P., & Marzan, J. C. B. Collecting language acquisition data from understudied urban communities: A reply to Cristia et al.2023Journal of Child Language, 50(3), 522-526. DOI: 10.1017/S0305000922000721SFB-Related
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Gradient phonotactics in acquisition: A cross-linguistic corpus study.2022Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference (GALA 15), Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt a.M., Germany. 22-24 September.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., Valdez, M., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Acquisition of Tagalog nasals: A field psycholinguistic study with infants.2024Poster presented at the The 31st Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA., USA. 11-14 June.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R., & The Truly Global L+ school organziersRunning a truly international school on early language development.2022Poster presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (XXIII ICIS - Developmental Cascades), Ottawa, Canada. 07 - 10 July.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.Casting a wider linguistic net: Language acquisition insights from an Austronesian language.2024Plenary talk at the 16th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Prague, Czech Republic. 15-19 July. Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.Infants’ sensitivity to phonotactics: From universal to language-specific preferences.2024nvited talk at the Potsdam Phonotactics Workshop, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany. March.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.Sonority sequencing effects on infants’ phonotactic acquisition: A study on German and Japanese.2023Invited Talk at the University of Tokyo, Japan. December.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline: A challenge for language acquisition.2023Invited talk at the RTG 2070 Colloquium, University of Göttingen, Göttingen,Germany. November. Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.Conducting psycholinguistic research in urban communities: Challenges and solutions.2023Invited talk at the Cameroonian Association of Psycholinguistics and Clinical linguistics conference, Online. July.Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.Diversity in child language acquisition research.2023Invited talk at the Friday Primes, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. 27 January. Talk or Presentation
Garcia, R.The lack of diversity in child language research and what we can do about it.2022Invited talk at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan colloquium, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Online. 07 SeptembeTalk or Presentation
Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Bilingual adults’ phonotactic knowledge: a lexical decision task.2024OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/AEP28Other
Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Phonotactic intuition in French/German bilingual adults, a metalinguistic wellformedness judgment task.2023OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/YDA94Other
Garcia, R., Lu, Y., Tsuji, S., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Japanese-learning infants' sonority sequencing preference: Rises vs. falls.2024OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/4JFHSOther
Garcia, R., Lu, Y., Tsuji, S., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.German infants' sonority sequencing preference: Plateaus vs. falls.2024OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/5ECNQOther
Panchenko, Y., Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.The perception of consonant clusters in Russian speakers: The Sonority Sequencing Principle as a gradient phenomenon?2024OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/B25JGOther
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. Phonetic discrimination in Tagalog-learning infants: Follow-up experiments.2024OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/3AQWYOther
Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.Phonetic discrimination in Tagalog-learning infants.2023OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/82V49Other
Garcia, R., Lu, Y., Tsuji, S., & Boll-Avetisyan, N.German infants' sonority sequencing preference: Rises vs. falls.2023OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/FKARPOther
Langus, A., & Boll-Avetisyan, NMusical experience is linked with infants’ pupillary entrainment to speech.2024Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS XXIV), Symposium: Comparing the Forms, Functions, and Benefits of Different Modes of Infant-Directed Communication, Glasgow, Scotland. 08-11 July.Talk or Presentation