Projekt 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
Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (+49) 331 977-2374 natalie.boll-avetisyan@uni-potsdam.de Homepage Universität ResearchGate ORCID
Papers
| Author(s) | Title | Year | Published in | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Garcia, R., Roeser, J., & Kidd, E. | Online data collection to address language sampling bias: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. | 2022 | Linguistics Vanguard. DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2021-0040 | |
| 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+/) 2021 | 2023 | Journal of Cognition and Development DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2023.2231083 | |
| Barrios, A., & Garcia, R. | Filipino Children’s Acquisition of Nominal and Verbal Markers in L1 and L2 Tagalog. | 2023 | Languages, 8(3), 188. DOI: 10.3390/languages8030188 | |
| Garcia, R., Roeser, J., & Kidd, E. | Finding your voice: Voice-specific effects in Tagalog reveal the limits of word order priming. | 2023 | Cognition, 236, 105424. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105424 | |
| Piot, L., Nazi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic regularities related to perceptually low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study. | 2024 | Frontiers in Psychology, 15. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1367240 | |
| Pizarro-Guevara, J. S., & Garcia, R. | Philippine Psycholinguistics. | 2024 | Annual Review of Linguistics, 10, 145-167. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031522-102844 | |
| Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Bilingual adults’ phonotactic knowledge: a lexical decision task. | 2024 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/AEP28 | |
| Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Phonotactic intuition in French/German bilingual adults, a metalinguistic wellformedness judgment task. | 2023 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/YDA94 | |
| Garcia, R., Lu, Y., Tsuji, S., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Japanese-learning infants' sonority sequencing preference: Rises vs. falls. | 2024 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/4JFHS | |
| Garcia, R., Lu, Y., Tsuji, S., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | German infants' sonority sequencing preference: Plateaus vs. falls. | 2024 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/5ECNQ | |
| Panchenko, Y., Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | The perception of consonant clusters in Russian speakers: The Sonority Sequencing Principle as a gradient phenomenon? | 2024 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/B25JG | |
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Phonetic discrimination in Tagalog-learning infants: Follow-up experiments. | 2024 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/3AQWY | |
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Phonetic discrimination in Tagalog-learning infants. | 2023 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/82V49 | |
| Garcia, R., Lu, Y., Tsuji, S., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | German infants' sonority sequencing preference: Rises vs. falls. | 2023 | OSF pre-registration. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/FKARP | |
| 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. | 2023 | Journal of Child Language, 50(3), 522-526. DOI: 10.1017/S0305000922000721 |
Talks
| Author(s) | Title | Year | Published in | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Infant-directed speech might be tailored for learning phonotactics. | 2022 | Paper presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (XXIII ICIS - Developmental Cascades), Ottawa, Canada. 07 - 10 July. | |
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Infant-directed speech might be tailored for learning phonotactic principles. | 2022 | Paper presented at the 18th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (Online). 23 - 25 June, 2022. | |
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Infant-directed speech supports phonotactic learning in German. | 2022 | Paper presented at the Workshop on Infant Language Development, San Sebastián, Spain. 09 - 11 June, 2022. | |
| 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 Africa | 2022 | Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIII ICIS - Developmental Cascades), Ottawa, Canada. 07 - 10 July. | |
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Gradient phonotactics in acquisition: A cross-linguistic corpus study. | 2022 | Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference (GALA 15), Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt a.M., Germany. 22-24 September. | |
| Garcia, R., & The Truly Global L+ school organziers | Running a truly international school on early language development. | 2022 | Poster presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (XXIII ICIS - Developmental Cascades), Ottawa, Canada. 07 - 10 July. | |
| Garcia, R. | The lack of diversity in child language research and what we can do about it. | 2022 | Invited talk at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan colloquium, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Online. 07 Septembe | |
| Garcia, R., Lu, Y., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Limits of variability in infant phonotactic acquisition: A study on the sonority sequencing principle. | 2023 | Poster presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL) 2023, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 25-27 October. | |
| 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 Ghana | 2023 | Paper presented at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 54), University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA. 12-14 June. | |
| 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 languages | 2023 | Paper presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB14), Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. 26-30 June. | |
| 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 harmony | 2023 | Paper presented at the Many Paths to Language (MPaL 2023), Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 25-27 October. | |
| Garcia, R. | Sonority sequencing effects on infants’ phonotactic acquisition: A study on German and Japanese. | 2023 | Invited Talk at the University of Tokyo, Japan. December. | |
| Garcia, R. | Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline: A challenge for language acquisition. | 2023 | Invited talk at the RTG 2070 Colloquium, University of Göttingen, Göttingen,Germany. November. | |
| Garcia, R. | Conducting psycholinguistic research in urban communities: Challenges and solutions. | 2023 | Invited talk at the Cameroonian Association of Psycholinguistics and Clinical linguistics conference, Online. July. | |
| Garcia, R. | Diversity in child language acquisition research. | 2023 | Invited talk at the Friday Primes, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. 27 January. | |
| Garcia, R., Langus, A., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Infants’ sensitivity to sonority sequencing: evidence from behavior and pupillary synchronization. | 2024 | Paper presented at the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2024), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 19-21 June. | |
| Omane, P.O., Boll-Avetisyan, N., & Benders, T. | Multilingual infants in Ghana’s ability to use tongue root harmony cues for word segmentation in Akan | 2024 | Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIV ICIS), Glasgow, UK. 08 - 11 July. | |
| Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Infants’ phonotactic sensitivities to regularities involving low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study. | 2024 | Paper presented at the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2024), University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 19-21 June. | |
| Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Auditory phonotactic wellformedness intuitions depend on the nativeness of a speaker’s pronunciation. | 2024 | Paper presented at the Linguistic Evidence 2024, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany. 22-23 February. | |
| Piot, L., Nazzi, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Wordlikeness intuitions depend on the nativeness of a speaker’s pronunciation. | 2024 | Paper 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. | |
| 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. | 2024 | Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIV ICIS), Glasgow, UK. 08 - 11 July. | |
| Garcia, R., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Phonetic discrimination in Tagalog-learning infants: Testing the influence of acoustic salience. | 2024 | Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (XXIV ICIS), Glasgow, UK. 08 - 11 July. | |
| Garcia, R., Valdez, M., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. | Acquisition of Tagalog nasals: A field psycholinguistic study with infants. | 2024 | Poster presented at the The 31st Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA., USA. 11-14 June. | |
| Garcia, R. | Casting a wider linguistic net: Language acquisition insights from an Austronesian language. | 2024 | Plenary talk at the 16th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Prague, Czech Republic. 15-19 July. | |
| Garcia, R. | Infants’ sensitivity to phonotactics: From universal to language-specific preferences. | 2024 | nvited talk at the Potsdam Phonotactics Workshop, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany. March. | |
| Langus, A., & Boll-Avetisyan, N | Musical experience is linked with infants’ pupillary entrainment to speech. | 2024 | Paper 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. |
