Scholarship Awardees: Victoria Thatte

One of the projects funded by the Ladefoged Scholarship so far, Victoria's dissertation research delves into the beginnings of infants' acquisition of the sounds of their native language.

The Ladefoged Scholarship helped Victoria with the cost of recruiting parents to participate in the study with their children, by covering postage for the letters that are mailed to parents informing them of the study and telling them how they can participate.

Once a parent decides to participate in the study, he or she comes to the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab and sits in the dimly-lit testing booth. While the parent listens to music over headphones, the infant watches blinking lights while listening to music and speech playing from speakers behind the lights:

First, a blinking light in the front of the booth gets the infant's attention. Once he or she is interested, the front light turns off and a light on one side of the booth begins blinking. When the infant looks at that light, sound starts playing, and keeps playing for up to 20 seconds, or until the infant gets bored and looks away for more than 2 seconds. Then the side light turns off, the sound ends, and the front light starts blinking again to repeat the process.

The first two times through this, the sound playing is a short clip of classical music; after that, the baby listens to made-up syllables whose sounds have different properties. In the first study, the syllables differ in whether the vocal cords are vibrating during the first sound of the syllable: half of the syllables begin with voiced sounds like [z], while the other half begin with voiceless sounds like [s]. We're interested in finding out whether infants seem to find one of these types of sounds more interesting than the other. If so, the follow-up studies will determine why that might be.

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	Victoria Thatte's Dissertation Research One of the projects funded by the Ladefoged Scholarship so far, Victoria's dissertation research delves into the beginnings of infants' acquisition of the sounds of their native language. The Ladefoged Scholarship helped Victoria with the cost of recruiting parents to participate in the study with their children, by covering postage for the letters that are mailed to parents informing them of the study and telling them how they can participate. Once a parent decides to participate in the study, he or she comes to the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab and sits in the dimly-lit testing booth. While the parent listens to music over headphones, the infant watches blinking lights while listening to music and speech playing from speakers behind the lights: First, a blinking light in the front of the booth gets the infant's attention. Once he or she is interested, the front light turns off and a light on one side of the booth begins blinking. When the infant looks at that light, sound starts playing, and keeps playing for up to 20 seconds, or until the infant gets bored and looks away for more than 2 seconds. Then the side light turns off, the sound ends, and the front light starts blinking again to repeat the process. The first two times through this, the sound playing is a short clip of classical music; after that, the baby listens to made-up syllables whose sounds have different properties. In the first study, the syllables differ in whether the vocal cords are vibrating during the first sound of the syllable: half of the syllables begin with voiced sounds like [z], while the other half begin with voiceless sounds like [s]. We're interested in finding out whether infants seem to find one of these types of sounds more interesting than the other. If so, the follow-up studies will determine why that might be.
	back to Ladefoged Scholarship main page Last Updated 4/2010