About the funded projects:
Michelle Jennifer White
Infant directed speech (IDS) is a register used by adults to adapt their speech when talking to infants. IDS is characterised by an extension of corner vowels, a reduced rate of speech and an increase in pitch. However, emerging evidence from less studied languages has shown that vowels space expansion and pitch is inconsistent across languages, suggesting that IDS can vary according to languages and dialects. While many previous studies examined the relationship between IDS and word comprehension and production in infants and report inconsistent results, only few studies examined the relationship between the acoustic features of IDS and infants’ sound representations; yet incoming speech has been claimed to shape early sound representations. To address this gap in research, we will investigate infants’ discrimination of the vowel contrast /i/-/u/ in an eye-tracking task and examine its relationship to the acoustic features of the same sounds produced in IDS across settings and tasks. Findings from this project will contribute theoretically to our growing knowledge of the role of IDS in language development, especially for Norwegian which is an understudied language.
Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos
Absolute adjectives (like 'straight' and 'full') can have both precise ('perfectly straight') and imprecise ('straight enough') interpretations, but it is unclear which of these (if any) is part of the encoded meaning of the adjectives. Is precision part of the lexical entry of these adjectives, or are absolute adjectives underspecified for precision? The current project investigates this question via a series of pupillometry experiments. We aim to tease apart the role of context (visual and discourse-based) on the incremental processing of uttearnces containing these adjectives. The project will bring insight into how words are stored in the mental lexicon.