M. Julia Carbajal

Dashlane · Engineering

Recognizing word forms is an important step on infants’ way toward mastering their native language. The present study takes a meta‐analytic approach to assess overarching questions on the literature of early word‐form recognition. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which there is cross‐linguistic evidence for an early recognition lexicon,...

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to...

Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that have recently been primed are favoured in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example of structural priming. Research on children's use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce. Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether...

Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that haverecently been primed are favored in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example ofstructural priming. Research on children’s use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce.Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5-6-...

Recognizing word forms is an important step on infants’ way towards mastering their native language. The present study takes a meta-analytic approach to assess overarching questions on the literature of early word-form recognition. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which there is cross-linguistic evidence for an early recognition lexicon,...

We investigate bilingual children’s perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., green is pronounced with a final [m] in green pen), while French has voicing assimilation (e.g., sac is pronounced...

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explor...

We examined properties of the input and the environment that characterize bilingual exposure in 11‐month‐old infants with a regular exposure to French and an additional language, and their possible effects on receptive vocabulary size. Using a diary method, we found that a majority of the families roughly followed a one‐parent–one‐language approach...

We developed an automatic French text phonologizer that transforms orthographic transcriptions of speech into approximate phonological transcriptions taking into account four phonological rules, i.e. liaison, liquid deletion, enchaˆınementenchaˆınement, and "je"-devoicing. Using this tool, we compiled a phonologized corpus of speech input to infant...

During the first years of life, children rapidly learn to process speech from a continuous acoustic signal, and soon become able to understand and produce the sounds, words and structure of their native language. Children growing up in a bilingual environment face an additional challenge: they must simultaneously discover and separate their bilingu...

Assimilation rules, by which certain consonants adopt one or more phonetic features of a following consonant, are widespread across languages. Previous research has shown that during word recognition, 24- and 33-month-old English and French monolingual toddlers compensate for their native rule (i.e., voicing assimilation in French, place assimilati...

Research using preferential listening paradigms has found that 11-month-old infants learning different languages prefer listening to lists of familiar as opposed to unfamiliar words (e.g. Hallé & de Boysson-Bardies, 1994; Vihman & DePaolis, 1999; Vihman et al., 2004, Swingley, 2005). This has been taken as evidence for the existence of a recognitio...

By the end of their first year of life, infants have become experts in discriminating the sounds of their native language, while they have lost the ability to discriminate non-native contrasts. This type of phonetic learning is referred to as perceptual attunement. In the present study, we investigated the emergence of a context-dependent form of p...

When a word is read more than once, reading time generally decreases in the successive occurrences. This Repetition Effect has been used to study word encoding and memory processes in a variety of experimental measures. We studied naturally occurring repetitions of words within normal texts (stories of around 3000 words). Using Linear Mixed Models...

In order to avoid mixing up languages, infants immersed in a multilingual environment have to sort speech into language-homogeneous sets. To study the feasibility of this task, we use speech technology tools (Universal Background Models and i-vectors) in combination with unsupervised clustering to test language separation using speech from several...

Experimental research suggests that at birth infants can discriminate two languages if they belong to different rhythmic classes, and by 4 months of age they can discriminate two languages within the same class provided they have been previously exposed to at least one of them. In this paper, we present a novel application of speech technology tool...

Experimental research suggests that at birth infants can discriminate two languages if they belong to different rhythmic classes, and by 4 months of age they can discriminate two languages within the same class provided they have been previously exposed to at least one of them. In this paper, we present a novel application of speech technology tool...

The neurobiology of reaching has been extensively studied in human and non-human primates. However, the mechanisms that allow a subject to decide-without engaging in explicit action-whether an object is reachable are not fully understood. Some studies conclude that decisions near the reach limit depend on motor simulations of the reaching movement....