Skip to main content
Languages, Linguistics and Film

Breadcrumb

  1. Languages, Linguistics and Film
  2. Linguistics
  3. News
  4. Items

Kathleen McCarthy and her collaborators at UCL SHaPS and QMUL Engineering are awarded an ESRC grant to build a new recording device that helps track early language acquisition in multilingual infants and adults

Published:

Congratulations Kathleen and colleagues on a second grant this year! Details below:

Quantifying phonetic input in first and second language speech learning  (January 2025 - 2029)

Investigators: Paul Iverson (lead, UCL), Kathleen McCarthy (co-lead), Lin Wang (co-lead, QMUL EECS), Bronwen Evans (co-lead, UCL)

Quantifying speech input is critical for understanding how children learn first languages. The amount and types of child-directed speech heard early in life have been linked to better language and educational outcomes and these results are beginning to lead to interventions to improve outcomes for children. Our central idea is that day-long recording methodologies are highly informative and could be transformative to our understanding of speech perception if they were used with a wider range of populations and measures. In this project we will develop a new open-source wearable recorder that includes a microphone array to better isolate individual speakers. We will conduct longitudinal investigations with children from multilingual homes starting at 9 months old, and similarly test multilingual adults who move to the UK for the purpose of education. The acoustics and words of speech input will be measured using our recorder and analysed using corpus phonetics techniques, machine learning and AI. Speech perception skills will be assessed using  neural (EEG) analyses of auditory and lexical processing. We will then link our phonetic measures of input to our neural processing  measures. Our project will expand the equipment and methodologies available to speech-input researchers and extend investigation across a wider age range, to better understand language acquisition throughout the lifespan.
 

See here for more details: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FZ503630%2F1

 

 

Back to top