Scientific Wednesdays at Psychologists: body language

The Institute of Psychology invites you to the meeting in the "Scientific Wednesdays at Psychologists" series. On 21 October, dr Elina Rubertus from Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin will give a lecture entitled "The role of the body in early language acquisition".

"Scientific Wednesdays at Psychologists" is a series of short lectures held at the Institute of Psychology every Wednesday at 2 p.m. in room 105. Admission is free.

Lecture summary: Producing speech demands fine-grained coordination across different body parts. On the one hand, there is the vocal apparatus, a whole orchestra of muscles spanning the respiratory system, the larynx with its vocal folds, and the oral cavity, tuned and timed precisely to create an acoustic signal that others can understand. On the other hand, the rest of our body is usually active too when we speak – we move our head, upper limbs, or even whole body to underscore meaning, rhythm, or emphasis. One of the many challenges infants face is learning to conduct this orchestra of speech along with the additional body movements.

In this talk, I will introduce our current project Voc2Speak which takes a more holistic, multimodal view of early language acquisition than most previous work. In addition to vocalizations, we also address respiration and body motion in infants between 6 and 14 months of age. Our longitudinal design allows us to track developmental changes and investigate how the three measures interact at a given age. As data collection is still underway, I will outline our framework and hypotheses and share first glimpses of how infants learn to bring breath, voice, and body into concert.