August 2021: In past research, we had found that when speaking, children at 3-4-5 years of age coarticulate more than at 7. While this developmental change may be attributed to maturational effects, this period also coincides with children's first steps into reading. In the framework of our Marie Curie "PredictAble" project, Anisia Popescu and Aude Noiray found that the acquisition of reading interacts with children's coarticulatory organization at the time children build correspondences between individual graphemes, phonemes and speech motor gestures. You can read about the findings in this recently published article.
Upcoming in September 2021: Anisia Popescu and Aude Noiray will present reserach on the link between speech production and reading fluency at the next AMLaP in september.
June 2021: As part of her PhD project, Stella Krüger investigated developmental differences in anticipatory perception in German children and adults. She found that listeners are sensitive to information dynamics, assigning greater weight to the magnitude of change in the acoustic signal than to the overall amount of vocalic information spread throughout a speech sequence. Her findings have been published in Journal of Child Language.
Upcoming in December 2021: Congratulation Dzhuma Abakarova to be accepted at the tough-to-get-in BUCLD conference! She will present results from her PhD project in which she combined empirical data with computing simulations to decipher differences in articulatory strategies between children & adults.
After 6 and a half years of insightful discoveries, LOLA lab has closed May, 31st, 2021. We thank all the students who have contributed to the lab's efforts via internships, Bachelor, Master, PhD, Postdoctoral and various collaborative projects. We are also deeply grateful to all the parents and children who have enrolled in our studies. Nothing could have been done without their time and interest in our research!
For Potsdamer Tag der Wissenschaften 2021, Elina Rubertus raised awareness on developmental language disorders. Check out her video! Collaboration with Outi Tuomainen.
As part of her PhD project, Dzhuma Abakarova combined experimental data with computing simulations to investigate differences in articulatory strategies between 3-, 4-, 5-, 7-year old children and adults. Her findings have now been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Within our collaborative Marie Curie PredictAble ITN, Orsolya Kolozsvári (Jyväskylä University) has investigated the cortical tracking of various sized units of speech that are crucial for spoken language processing in children and adults. The findings have been published in Neurobiology of Language. Congratulations!
Congratulation Cheslie Klein for getting a merit-based PhD scholarship at the MPI in Leipzig!
Congratulation Jennifer Sander (M.Sc candidate in our lab) for getting a PhD scholarship at the MPI!
Aude Noiray will co-organize the next Speech motor Control conference to be held in Groningen (main lead: Pr. Ben Maassen). She will also chair the language acqustion session and give a plenary talk.