Audun Rosslund
babies are cool
- Do parents exaggerate the pronunciation of words they believe their infants don’t know yet? Our new paper suggests no. ❌ w/ @julienmayor.bsky.social & @nataliakartushina.bsky.social 🧵 1/ #DevSci #langsky #devpsy
- Analysing 38,000+ speech segments from Norwegian parents interacting with their 8–18-month-olds, we found that neither pitch, pitch variation, vowel length, nor vowel clarity differed depending on infants’ presumed knowledge of a word. /2
- That is, parents do not spontaneously adjust the acoustic features of words based on whether they think their infant knows them or not! /3
- These results challenge the idea that infant-directed speech (primarily) serves a didactic function for language learning, highlighting instead its social and emotional role in early parent-infant communication. Data, code, and preregistration at osf.io/s8zrm /end
- Do older siblings help or hinder language development? And does it matter if they’re sisters or brothers? In our new paper we revisit the "birth order effect"... and took it a step further! w/ @julienmayor.bsky.social, Nora Serres and Natalia Kartushina 🙌 🧵 1/ #DevSci #langsky #devpsy
- Using parent-reported data from 6,000+ Norwegian infants (8–36 months), we found that expressive and receptive vocabulary sizes tends to decrease with additional older siblings... but only up to a point. For later-borns, vocab. actually starts increasing again. 2/
- To make better sense of this, we introduced a new metric: the child-to-caregiver ratio, a data-driven measure of how many "caregivers" (parents and old-enough siblings) a child has relative to the number of children in the household. A lower ratio was associated with larger vocabularies. 3/
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View full threadWe invite others to explore and use the child-to-caregiver ratio in their own work via our open Shiny app calculator: 👉 socialnet.uiocloud.no/socialApp/ct... (warning; slow load!). Open data, code, and preregistration: osf.io/pjn8k/ /end
- New paper out! Following from our work on vowels and prosody in infant-directed speech, we turned our attention to features of consonants and their role in language development. Great collab (as always!) w/ @julienmayor.bsky.social, Nina Varjola and Natalia Kartushina 🧵 1/ #DevSci #langsky #devpsy
- We examined voice onset time (VOT)—the interval between a consonant's release and vocal fold vibration, which distinguishes voiced and voiceless stops (e.g., /b/-/p/)—in speech recorded during shared reading interactions in Norwegian parent-infant and parent-experimenter dyads. 2/
- We found that, compared to adult-directed speech, voiceless stops in IDS had longer VOTs, while voiced stops had shorter, leading to overall less distinct consonant contrasts (/b-p/, /d-t/, /g-k/) in IDS than ADS. From 6 to 12 months, VOTs in IDS became more similar to ADS. 3/
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View full threadConsonants, like vowels, appear to be less distinct in IDS than ADS, thus reinforcing the interpretation that IDS may serve an attentional and/or affective aim, rather than a didactic purpose. /end
- Reposted by Audun RosslundInterested in doing a PhD on language acquisition in Oslo? Check application process: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... and feel free to reach out for more information! PS. We have a nice growing community including Natalia Kartushina, Luca Onnis, @audunrosslund.bsky.social, and many more!
- 12 months of data collection, 317 lab sessions, 22,958 phrases, 54,594 vowels, and a gazillion supplementary tables later... proud to say that our longitudinal study on the acoustics of infant-directed speech is now out! 👶🧵 1/ #DevSci #langsky #devpsy royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
- First things first, this was only possible because of the great team of Natalia Kartushina, @julienmayor.bsky.social, @acristia.bsky.social, Arun Singh, Roger Mundry, fantastic RAs and helpful reviewers! 2/
- We followed 69 Norwegian families for one year and five lab sessions, from infants were 6–18 months. Parents’ speech were recorded while reading the same picture book to their infant (IDS), and to an experimenter (ADS), ensuring no distortion from different linguistic content of speech. 3/
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View full threadData, code and materials to the study is of course openly available at OSF. Watch this space for whether and how these parents' acoustic properties relate to their infants’ language skills! /end
- Reposted by Audun RosslundDevelopmental Cognitive Scientists by @deontbenton.bsky.socialat://did:plc:4xpqztyjb6yorb6v7t73pn7k/app.bsky.graph.starterpack/3lazzixmxfp2q
- Can't get enough of infant habituation designs!?💥 In our new paper, @julienmayor.bsky.social, Alex Cristia, Natalia Kartushina and I tested native and non-native vowel discrimination in 6-month-old Norwegian infants using eye-tracking. 👶👀 1/
- We consider several linguistic and methodological explanations for these findings, incl. the acoustic subtlety of the contrasts, and conclude that our results challenge the strict "universal phoneticians" account while echoing calls for diversity in the literature on perceptual narrowing. 🌍🔍 /end
- 🚨 New paper! 🚨 Myself, @julienmayor.bsky.social and Natalia Kartushina investigated the relationship between shared reading, screen time, and vocabulary size in n=1,442 Norwegian infants from diverse SES backgrounds. Spoiler alert: Get out those books! 📚👶 1/5
- Of course, our study is correlational, and other factors might be moderating the associations. Still, our results support current recommendations to engage in shared reading while limiting screen time early in life. 📚💪 Data, code and materials is of course openly available! 5/5
- Reposted by Audun RosslundGOOD MORNING BLUESKY! Very excited about this new paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300671120 Key Q: what predicts how much young kids (👶)talk? How much 🗣 kids heard predicted how much 👶talked, but other factors, e.g. mom’s education, didn’t. #PsychSci #DevPsy 🗣💬 INCOMING SUMMARY🧵ALERT 1/14
- Reposted by Audun RosslundI am also excited to announce a call for papers for our special issue on Metaphor Comprehension Development (in @langdevres.bsky.social) 🙌 Submissions due March 1st, 2024 - for more information about the call please visit the journal website: ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu
