Ranka Bijeljac-Babic
Retired Associate Professor – Hosted
Most babies are likely to learn several languages. I am trying to understand how children who are bilingual from birth acquire their two languages. Currently, I study monolingual and bilingual infants’ ability to perceive and produce the accentuation of words in different languages.
Ongoing project
Role of visual information in speech perception/production development
Project team lead
Thierry Nazzi
Project team lead
Arlette Streri
A general sense of quantity at birth
Project team lead
Maria Dolores (Lola) de Hevia
Prosodic grouping biases from birth to adulthood in monolingual speakers
This project studies how adults and young children use variations in intensity, duration and intonation to group syllables into word units.
Project team lead
Thierry Nazzi
Characterisation of the processing of acoustic cues and speech processing in noise in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss – SPINTAE
In this large-scale study, we aim to evaluate the processing abilities of different acoustic indices between 5 and 10 years of age in children without hearing problems and those with sensorineural hearing loss.
Project team lead
Laurianne Cabrera
Neural processing of temporal modulations and computational modelling – Heardevcomp
The processing of acoustic information, such as variations in sound amplitude over time called “sound envelope”, is of crucial importance for speech perception in adults. We will seek to characterize the evolution of sound envelope processing during development in infants.
Project team lead
Laurianne Cabrera
Perception of sibilant consonants and understanding of plurals in hearing-impaired children – LaulauH
The objective is to understand to what extent a deficit in perception of certain sounds, such as “s” and “z”, when they are heard in background noise, can have an impact on oral comprehension of the plural in subject-verb agreement.
Project team lead
Laurianne Cabrera
Development of the auditory system and speech perception in infants- BabySIN
On the one hand, the cerebral processing of different acoustic variations of sounds is studied in 3-month-old infants using the electroencephalography technique. On the other hand, the ability to perceive speech in noise in these infants is measured using an observation technique.
Project team lead
Laurianne Cabrera
Proccesing phonological information while learning and recognizing words
It has been proposed that consonants carry more weight than vowels in lexical processing. Given the timing of acquisition observed in French, we have proposed that this consonant bias emerges in connection with phonological and (proto)lexical acquisition, a hypothesis we are currently testing.
Project team lead
Thierry Nazzi
Predicting language outcomes in typical development
We explore how elementary perception and learning mechanisms are linked to language acquisition. To this end, we test infants on different perception and learning mechanisms, at different stages of their development and up to 2-3 years of age.
Project team lead
Thierry Nazzi
Vicarious Social Touch perception in infants
The aim of this project is to investigate the physiological, behavioural and neural responses of infants to social-tactile interactions.
Project team lead
Olivier Mascaro
Project team lead
Louise Krisch
Selected Publications
– Bijeljac-Babic, R. 2019. Développement du langage chez l’enfant monolingue et bilingue. In Le développement du bébé : de la vie foetale à la marche, E. Devouche et J. Provasi, Paris : Elsevier Masson.
– Höhle, B, Bijeljac-Babic, R., Nazzi, T. 2019. Variability and stability in early language acquisition: Comparing monolingual and bilingual infants’ speech perception and word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–16.
– Bijeljac-Babic R, Höhle B, Nazzi T. (2016). Early prosodic acquisition in bilingual infants: The case of the perceptual trochaic bias. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 210.
– Bijeljac-Babic R, Nassurally K, Havy M, Nazzi T. (2009). Infants can rapidly learn words in a foreign language. Infant Behavior and Development, 32, 476-480.
– Höhle B, Bijeljac-Babic R, Herold B, Weissenborn J, Nazzi T. (2009). The development of language specific prosodic preferences during the first half year of life: evidence from German and French. Infant Behavior and Development, 32, 262-274.