Do peer interactions influence infant communication development?

Studying infants in daycare or school settings enables us to ask whether infants influence each others’ development,and if so, whether peer influences are similar to influences from adult caregivers. Answering these questions will not onlyinform infant educators but can also help us understand the mechanisms underlying infant learning. We have collected audiorecordings from 21 1- to 21-month-old infants in two infant rooms in our campus early childhood education center. Recordingstook place nearly every school day over a continuous 8 month period, for an average of 231 hours of recording per child.Multiple infants within the same room were recorded simultaneously. We will present our approach to synchronizing, coding,and analyzing these recordings toward the goal of understanding peer influences on vocal communication development, presentpreliminary results, and seek input on how to further analyze this large and unique dataset

Early Human Vocalization Development: A Collection of Studies Utilizing Automated Analysis of Naturalistic Recordings and Neural Network Modeling

Understanding early human vocalization development is a key part of understanding the origins of human communication. What are the characteristics of early human vocalizations and how do they change over time? What mechanisms underlie these changes? This dissertation is a collection of three papers that take a computational approach to addressing these questions, using neural network simulation and automated analysis of naturalistic data.The first paper uses a self-organizing neural network to automatically derive holistic acoustic features characteristic of prelinguistic vocalizations. A supervised neural network is used to classify vocalizations into human-judged categories and to predict the age of the child vocalizing. The study represents a first step toward taking a data-driven approach to describing infant vocalizations. Its performance in classification represents progress toward developing automated analysis tools for coding infant vocalization types.The second paper is a computational model of early vocal motor learning. It adapts a popular type of neural network, the self-organizing map, in order to control a vocal tract simulator and in order to have learning be dependent on whether the model\u27s actions are reinforced. The model learns both to control production of sound at the larynx (phonation), an early-developing skill that is a prerequisite for speech, and to produce vowels that gravitate toward the vowels in a target language (either English or Korean) for which it is reinforced. The model provides a computationally-specified explanation for how neuromotor representations might be acquired in infancy through the combination of exploration, reinforcement, and self-organized learning.The third paper utilizes automated analysis to uncover patterns of vocal interaction between child and caregiver that unfold over the course of day-long, totally naturalistic recordings. The participants include 16- to 48-month-old children with and without autism. Results are consistent with the idea that there is a social feedback loop wherein children produce speech-related vocalizations, these are preferentially responded to by adults, and this contingency of adult response shapes future child vocalizations. Differences in components of this feedback loop are observed in autism, as well as with different maternal education levels

Nominal cross recurrence as a generalized lag sequential analysis for behavioral streams

We briefly present lag sequential analysis for behavioral streams, a commonly used method in psychology for quantifying the relationships between two nominal time series. Cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) is shown as an extension of this technique, and we exemplify this nominal application of CRQA to eye-movement data in human interaction. In addition, we demonstrate nominal CRQA in a simple coupled logistic map simulation used in previous communication research, permitting the investigation of properties of nonlinear systems such as bifurcation and onset to chaos, even in the streams obtained by coarse-graining a coupled nonlinear model. We end with a summary of the importance of CRQA for exploring the relationship between two behavioral streams, and review a recent theoretical trend in the cognitive sciences that would be usefully informed by this and similar nonlinear methods. We hope this work will encourage scientists interested in general properties of complex, nonlinear dynamical systems to apply emerging methods to coarse-grained, nominal units of measure, as there is an immediate need for their application in the psychological domain

What do Babies hear? Analyses of Child- and Adult-Directed Speech

Child-directed speech is argued to facilitate language development, and is found cross-linguistically and cross-culturally to varying degrees. However, previous research has generally focused on short samples of child-caregiver interaction, often in the lab or with experimenters present. We test the generalizability of this phenomenon with an initial descriptive analysis of the speech heard by young children in a large, unique collection of naturalistic, daylong home recordings. Trained annotators coded automatically-detected adult speech 'utterances' from 61 homes across 4 North American cities, gathered from children (age 2-24 months) wearing audio recorders during a typical day. Coders marked the speaker gender (male/female) and intended addressee (child/adult), yielding 10,886 addressee and gender tags from 2,523 minutes of audio (cf. HB-CHAAC Interspeech ComParE challenge; Schuller et al., in press). Automated speaker-diarization (LENA) incorrectly gender-tagged 30% of male adult utterances, compared to manually-coded consensus. Furthermore, we find effects of SES and gender on child-directed and overall speech, increasing child-directed speech with child age, and interactions of speaker gender, child gender, and child age: female caretakers increased their child-directed speech more with age than male caretakers did, but only for male infants. Implications for language acquisition and existing classification algorithms are discussed

Estudo e caracterização da fiabilidade de um equipamento de deposição de massa lubrificante

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Mecânicautilização de sistemas de lubrificação automática implica a compreensão e controlo de diversos factores influenciadores do processo, sendo que os grandes pontos ainda por explorar neste âmbito referem-se, respectivamente, a esse controlo e não a insuficiências relativas a automatismos ou mecanismos. Desenvolveu-se, na empresa FEHST, um estudo destes factores, incidindo na lubrificação por massa lubrificante e tendo por base um equipamento de lubrificação por deposição automática já existente na empresa. O objectivo deste trabalho consiste, assim, na compreensão dos factores influenciadores do processo de lubrificação por deposição automática de massa lubrificante. As sugestões de desenvolvimento visam possibilitar um controlo do processo, que seja executado de forma prática e adequada às necessidades produtivas da empresa. São também apresentados e explicados quais os parâmetros de avaliação da deposição, bem como possíveis formas de inspecção automática, reduzindo ao mínimo a intervenção humana no controlo do processo.The usage of systems of automatic lubrication implies the understanding and control of several factors influencing this process. In this context, the major issues yet to be explored are, mostly, their control, and less any lack or misunderstanding of the automation procedures and/or automation equipment. The study of these factors was carried out in FEHST Company, focusing in this grease lubrication and based on a company’s already existent but not mastered automatic lubricating equipment. The aim of this project was directed to the study and understanding of the factors that influence the automatic grease dispensing process, which might provide further suggestions capable to enable a better and a practical control of the production process according to the company’s needs. Grease drop evaluation parameters are also discussed, studied and explained, as well as possible ways for an automatic inspection that can minimize Human intervention in the control process

Developing a cross-cultural annotation system and metacorpus for studying infants' real world language experience

Recent issues around reproducibility, best practices, and cultural bias impact naturalistic observational approaches as much as experimental approaches, but there has been less focus onthis area. Here, we present a new approach that leverages cross-laboratory collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts to examine important psychological questions. We illustrate this approach with a particular project that examines similarities and differences in children's early experiences with language. This project develops a comprehensive start-to-finish analysis pipeline by developing a flexible and systematic annotation system, and implementing this system across a sampling from a metacorpus of audiorecordings of diverse language communities. This resource is publicly available for use, sensitive to cultural differences, and flexible to address a variety of research questions. It is also uniquely suited for use in the development of tools for automated analysis.Fil: Soderstrom, Melanie. University of Manitoba; CanadáFil: Casillas, Marisa. University of Chicago; Estados UnidosFil: Bergelson, Elika. University of Duke; Estados UnidosFil: Rosemberg, Celia Renata. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Alam, Florencia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Warlaumont, Anne S.. University of California at Los Angeles; Estados UnidosFil: Bunce, John. California State University; Estados Unido

Nonequilibrium Josephson-like effects in wide mesoscopic S-N-S junctions

Mesoscopic superconducting-normal-metal-superconducting (S-N-S) junctions with a large separation between the superconducting electrodes (i.e. wide junctions) exhibit nonequilibrium supercurrents, even at temperatures for which the equilibrium Josephson effect is exponentially small. The second harmonic of the Josephson frequency dominates these currents, as observed in recent experiments. A simple description of these effects, in the spirit of the Resistively-Shunted-Junction model, is suggested here. It is used to calculate dc I-V characteristics, and to examine the effects of various types of noise and of external microwave radiation (Shapiro steps). It is found that the nonequilibrium supercurrents are excited when the junction is driven by a dc bias or an ac bias, or even by external noise. In the case of junctions which are also long in the direction perpendicular to the current flow, thermodynamic phase fluctuations (thermal noise) alone can drive the quasiparticles out of local equilibrium. Magnetic flux is then predicted to be trapped in units of Phi_0 /2 = hc/4e.Comment: 10 pages, to appear in a special issue of Superlattices & Microstructure

Vocal development in a large‐scale crosslinguistic corpus

This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1–36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., “ba” vs. “ee”). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Furthermore, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter‐annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in‐lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required, and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine‐grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large‐scale infant vocalization corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work