Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Welcome (back)! We are excited to relaunch this project. In addition to studying the sounds children make, we are now asking you to categorize the sounds people around them make. Check out the tutorial to learn more about our new workflow. Thank you for your continued help!
The Team
Alejandrina (Alex) Cristia
After a BA in Letters at Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina), a PhD in Linguistics at Purdue University, and a postdoctoral fellowship on neurobiology of language at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Netherlands), Alex became a Researcher with the CNRS in 2013, and joined the LSCP (cofunded by EHESS, ENS, PSL University). In her work, Alex seeks to answer questions related to the linguistic representations that infants and adults have, and how they are formed. To answer these questions, she combine multiple methodologies including spoken corpora analyses, behavioral studies, neuroimaging (NIRS) and computational modeling. Alex discovered fieldwork only recently, sporting only two trips on her CV: One to Bolivia in 2018 (to two Tsimane' villages) and the other to Papua New Guinea in 2019 (to Rossel Island). But she's always happy to annotate and analyze data collected by other people!
Kasia Hitczenko
Kasia joined the Cognitive Sciences & Psycholinguistic Laboratory (LSCP) as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022. Prior to that, she received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2019, before spending two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University. Kasia's research focuses on how infants learn the sounds of their language and she is currently studying how differences in experience (e.g., differences in how much caregivers speak to infants or how much infants practice vocalizing) impact infants' early vocal development.
Marvin Lavechin
After an engineering school in applied mathematics and computer sciences at ENSIMAG (Grenoble), Marvin joined the Cognitive Sciences & Psycholinguistic Laboratory (LSCP) to start his PhD in machine learning and language acquisition. His research focuses on learning language from child-like data. By recording what stimuli children receive (speech, vision, etc.), he tries to build computational models behaving in a child-like manner. These models can be examined to predict developmental delays and learn more about what is useful for acquiring language.
Sarah Walker
Sarah Walker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. She obtained her BA from Michigan State University and MA from the University of San Francisco. In 2015, Sarah completed her PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and shortly thereafter joined the School of Economics at UNSW. Her research focuses on topics in applied microeconomics, including economic development, economic history, culture and institutions, and the intersection of these issues with the environment. To explore these issues, Sarah's work incorporates applied econometric techniques, as well as field methods, such as randomized control trials and lab in the field experiments.
Pauline Grosjean
Pauline Grosjean is a Professor in the School of Economics at UNSW. Previously at the University of San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley, she has also worked as an Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. She completed her PhD in economics at Toulouse School in Economics in 2006 after graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Her research studies the historical and dynamic context of economic development. In particular, she focuses on how culture and institutions interact and shape long-term economic development and individual behaviour. She has published research that studies the historical process of a wide range of factors that are crucial for economic development, including cooperation and violence, trust, gender norms, support for democracy and for market reforms, immigration, preferences for education, and conflict.
Marisa Casillas
Marisa is an assistant professor in the Comparative Human Development department at the University of Chicago. Marisa received her PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2013 and later worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the MPI for Psycholinguistics. Broadly speaking, she is interested in exploring how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language. She uses a combination of experimental- and observation-based methods to investigate these processes. Marisa (aka Middy) has done fieldwork East and West - literally! She has visited a Tseltal village in Mexico several times, as well as Rossel Island in Papua New Guinea (three years in a row, zero encounters with pirates so far).
Organizations
The Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) is a research unit that brings together the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), the ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) (UMR 8554). Our lab is located in Paris, in the Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC) of the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
The goal of our research is to understand the psychological mechanism that underlie the acquisition and the functioning of the cognitive functions that typically characterise humans, such as language, social cognition and consciousness. We also have a BabyLab. To find out more about it, click on the logo above to check out our web page!
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a research institute devoted entirely to the study of psycholinguistics; that is, how we produce and understand language, and how we acquire these skills as first or second language learners. The MPI for Psycholinguistics is located in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. It is one of more than 80 research institutes that form part of the German Max Planck Society, and it is one of the few locations outside Germany. This Zooniverse project is associated with the Language Development Department (director: Prof. Dr. Caroline Rowland), which focuses on three major pieces of the language development puzzle: language in the brain, language across the world, and language over development. To learn more about the MPI for Psycholinguistics, the Language Development Department, and other affiliated research, please visit: https://www.mpi.nl/
