Analyzing Linguistic Development Around the World
A collaboration among linguists and speech experts
from the United States, Argentina, Canada, Finland, France, and the United
Kingdom to study child language development across nations and cultures to gain
a better understanding of how an infant’s environment affects subsequent
language ability. The project team includes researchers from Duke University
(US), CONICET (Argentina), University of Manitoba (Canada), Aalto University
(Finland), École Normale Supérieure (France), and Imperial College London (UK).
Co-funding provided by MINCyT (Argentina), SSHRC (Canada), AKA (Finland), CNRS
(France), and ESRC/AHRC (UK).
While research shows that the quantity and types of language heard by children affects language development, we know very little about the natural variability in language environments across individuals, communities, and languages. New technologies allow us to record and measure children’s language experiences across a typical day, in ways that are in principle comparable across populations. However, the field lacks standardized approaches to compare such language quantity and type across populations, and the tools needed to analyze child language experiences on a large scale are not fully developed. This proposal brings together child language researchers and speech science engineers to analyze daylong naturalistic recordings using both traditional hand-annotation and large-scale automated methods. Using this approach, we will analyze the speech infants hear within and across cultures and languages, and how these differences predict infants’ own subsequent language production.
Participating institutions:
Duke University (Durham, NC) - Applicant/Grantee
Aalto University (Espoo, ZZ) - Participating institution
CONICET (Buenos Aires, ) - Participating institution
Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris, ) - Participating institution
Imperial College London (London, ) - Participating institution
University of Manitoba (Manitoba, Canada, ZZ) - Participating institution