Alejandrina Cristia | |
---|---|
Occupation | Research Director |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Universidad Nacional de Rosario; Purdue University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS);Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique,Paris Sciences et Lettres University |
Website | Alex Cristia |
Alejandrina Cristia is an Argentinian linguist known for research on infant-directed speech,daylong audio recordings of children's diverse linguistic environments, [1] and language acquisition across cultures. [2] Cristia is interested in how phonetic and phonological representations are formed during infancy and their interactions with other linguistic formats and cognitive mechanisms. She holds the position of Research Director of the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) at the Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL University). [3]
Cristia received her B.A. degree in Letters at Universidad Nacional de Rosario in 2004. [4] She attended graduate school at Purdue University where she obtained a M.A. degree with honors in General Linguistics in 2006 and a Ph.D. degree in Linguistics in 2009 [4] under the supervision of Amanda Seidl. Her doctorate dissertation titled Individual Variation in Infant Speech Perception:Implications for Language Acquisition Theories examined the language-specific and domain-general factors in relation to infants' processing of speech sounds. [5] Cristia reported that language-specific factors affected infants' performance more than domain-general factors. [5]
From 2009 to 2011, [4] Cristia worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the LSCP in Paris,France. [3] Later,she joined the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as a scientific staff member. [4] [6] In 2013,Cristia became a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris,France. [7]
Cristia is a member of the LSCP Babylab [8] and the Daylong recordings of Children's Language Environment (DARCLE) network. [1] She is also engaged in the MetaLab project in early language acquisition and cognitive development, [9] and the HomeBank Project. [10]
Cristia received Annual Prize of the Academia Argentina de Letras in 2005. [7] She received the James S. McDonnell Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition in 2017. [11] In 2020,she received the CNRS Bronze medal for her research on language acquisition across cultures. [2]
In December 2020,The Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC) of Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) awarded her an ERC Consolidator Grant for her "Experience effects in early language acquisition" project. [4]
Cristia's research program examines language acquisition across cultures. She uses innovative research methods including behavioral methods,neuroimaging,and corpus analyses to measure children's speech perception and language development. [2]
During her graduate studies,Cristia's research focused on caregivers' influence on infants' acquisition of speech sounds, [12] and infants ability to track distributions of acoustic cues. [13] In one of her studies with Amanda Seidl,Cristia investigated 7-month-old infants' learning of an artificial grammar,and found that infants had the ability to generate some levels of constraints and further generalize them to other related phonemes. [14] Other research has examined the role of infant-directed speech in language development,indicating that it provides both emotional and linguistic input to assist children's language acquisition. [15]
Besides,using randomly or periodically sampled daylong recordings,Cristia's 2020 study conducted with several other scholars across various labs evaluated the accuracy of the LENA system (a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis) in terms of the full set of its key outcome measures,namely speaker classification accuracy,child vocalization counts,conversational turn counts,and adult word counts. [16] LENA system is known for assessing children's language environment. [16] This study found that the LENA system is good at detecting female and the target child voices,and the system can also accurately capture the child's vocalizations while not with other talkers' vocalizations. [16]
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language,as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain;that is,the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,use,comprehend,and produce language.
Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech,infant-directed speech (IDS),child-directed speech (CDS),child-directed language (CDL),caregiver register,parentese,or motherese.
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words,and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking,speakers perform many different intentional speech acts,e.g.,informing,declaring,asking,persuading,directing,and can use enunciation,intonation,degrees of loudness,tempo,and other non-representational or paralinguistic aspects of vocalization to convey meaning. In their speech,speakers also unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social position such as sex,age,place of origin,physical states,psychological states,physico-psychological states,education or experience,and the like.
The Institut Jean Nicod (IJN) is an interdisciplinary research center based in Paris,France. Its current director is the philosopher Roberto Casati (2017-),preceded by famous philosopher François Recanati (2010-2017) and Pierre Jacob (2002-2010). Created in 2002,its name commemorates the French philosopher,epistemologist and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1924). The IJN is jointly run by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS),École normale supérieure (ENS) and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS),three French research and higher education institutions. Since 2007,the ENS hosts the IJN where it is affiliated with both the Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC),of which it is a founding member,and the Department of Philosophy.
Jacques Mehler was a cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.
In the field of psychology,nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view,which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs. This factor contributes to the ongoing nature versus nurture dispute,one borne from the current difficulty of reverse engineering the subconscious operations of the brain,especially the human brain.
Bootstrapping is a term used in language acquisition in the field of linguistics. It refers to the idea that humans are born innately equipped with a mental faculty that forms the basis of language. It is this language faculty that allows children to effortlessly acquire language. As a process,bootstrapping can be divided into different domains,according to whether it involves semantic bootstrapping,syntactic bootstrapping,prosodic bootstrapping,or pragmatic bootstrapping.
Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual,particularly the acquisition of language in childhood. It involves research into the different stages in language acquisition,language retention,and language loss in both first and second languages,in addition to the area of bilingualism. Before infants can speak,the neural circuits in their brains are constantly being influenced by exposure to language. Developmental linguistics supports the idea that linguistic analysis is not timeless,as claimed in other approaches,but time-sensitive,and is not autonomous –social-communicative as well as bio-neurological aspects have to be taken into account in determining the causes of linguistic developments.
Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language (phonology) during their stages of growth.
Anne Fernald is an American psychologist. She serves as the Josephine Knotts Knowles Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University and has been described as "the leading researcher in infant-directed speech".
LENA is a developer of advanced technology and programs to accelerate language development of children 0–3 and to close opportunity gaps.
Speech acquisition focuses on the development of vocal,acoustic and oral language by a child. This includes motor planning and execution,pronunciation,phonological and articulation patterns.
Statistical language acquisition,a branch of developmental psycholinguistics,studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive,produce,comprehend,and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input. Statistical learning acquisition claims that infants' language-learning is based on pattern perception rather than an innate biological grammar. Several statistical elements such as frequency of words,frequent frames,phonotactic patterns and other regularities provide information on language structure and meaning for facilitation of language acquisition.
Prosodic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch,tempo,rhythm,amplitude,and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar,such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language,they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language,such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence,indicating the location of phrase boundaries,and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language,mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.
D. Kimbrough Oller,also known as Kim Oller,is an American scientist who has contributed to the fields of the evolution of language,child phonology,speech-language pathology,and to the fields of bilingualism and second-language acquisition. He is currently Professor and Plough Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis. He is also an external faculty member of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research and a permanent member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the LENA Research Foundation of Boulder,Colorado. Oller was elected as a Fellow of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA) in 2004 and was granted the Honors of ASHA in 2013.
Núria Sebastián Gallés is a cognitive scientist known for her work on bilingual language development and the impact of bilingualism on cognition. She is Professor of Psychology at Pompeu Fabra University where she heads the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) Research Group. In 2012,Sebastián Gallés received the Narcis Monturiol Medal as recognition of her scientific contributions. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2016.
Anne Christophe is a French researcher working in the field of cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris,France. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Ecole Normale Supérieure and of the Scientific Committee of National Education. She is also a former director of the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique at the Département d'études cognitives.
Rochelle Newman is an American psychologist. She is chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP),as well as associate director of the Maryland Language Science Center. She previously served as the director of graduate studies for both HESP and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and is also a member of the Center for the Comparative &Evolutionary Biology of Hearing. Newman helped found the University of Maryland Infant &Child Studies Consortium and the University of Maryland Autism Research Consortium.
Marilyn Shatz is an American scholar known for her work in language development and discourse. She holds the title of Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan,where she worked from 1977 until retiring in 2009.
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