Language development among Tsimane' children

The goal of this internship is describe children's input and outcomes based on extant transcriptions of the Tsimane', a forager-farmer society in the Bolivian Amazon. Quantitative studies have documented minimal child-directed speech (CDS) from Tsimane' adults to children and identified other children as substantial conversational partners to Tsimane' toddlers. However, qualitative dimensions of both linguistic inputs have largely remained unexplored.

Dyslexia: towards a new treatment?

Can reading performance of dyslexic readers be improved with auditory rhythmic training? A key ingredient for reading is the mapping of graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds). Thus, correct representation of speech sounds is critical for reading. At the same time, rhythmic brain activity seems to be crucial for language comprehension. In that way, comprehension is hindered when there is deficient alignment between brain rhythms and rhythms of perceived speech.

Infants’ developing lexicon

During the first year of life, infants develop word segmentation capacities and start storing segmented word candidates in a ‘protolexicon’. Previously, we showed that their sensitivity to statistical information leads them to include in this protolexicon frequently occurring non-word strings in addition to real words.

Perceiving environmental unnaturalness

The internship is under to supervision of Christian Lorenzi (LSP) and Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde (IJN) We are seeking a highly skilled M2 student with a strong background in analytic philosophy and a serious interest in environmental philosophy and sciences for an internship on the topic of "Perceiving Environmental Unnaturalness." Internship objective: The primary aim of this internship is to map the dual concepts of "naturalness" and "unnaturalness" as they are discussed in both philosophical and scientific literature.

Infants' acquisition of word segmentation

Words are a central building block of language, and segmenting words out of continuous speech is a challenging step in early language acquisition. Indeed, in spoken language there is no acoustic equivalent to the spaces that separate words in written language: spoken words are not separated by pauses. Infants start developing word segmentation abilities during the first year of life, relying on their sensitivity to both phonological and syllable co-occurrence cues to word boundaries.

Bilingual children’s processing of phonological rules

Languages differ in their phonology, e.g. in the sounds they use and in the processes that modify these sounds across words. For instance, in English, /t/ can sometimes be changed into /p/: “sweet boy” can be pronounced as “sweep boy”, whereas in French, /t/ can sometimes be changed into /d/: “botte verte” can be pronounced as “bodde verte”). In previous work we showed that 6-year-old French-English bilingual children have implicit knowledge about these processes and do not confuse which one applies in which language.
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