Internship Opportunities: Exploring Early Prosodic Development

The Institute for Language Sciences at Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht invite applications for some exciting internships focused on how infants develop prosodic skills—the melody and rhythm of speech—from the third trimester of pregnancy through their third year of life. Prosody, which includes variations in pitch, duration, and intensity, is vital for speech structure and communication. Children demonstrate knowledge of native-language prosody at birth and rely on it for early language development. However, the mechanisms behind how they learn prosody so early remain largely unknown.

Project Overview: SoundStart

The SoundStart project seeks to uncover the mechanisms driving prosodic development both before birth and during the first three years of life. The project focuses on two key aspects of prosody development:

• Prosodic Phrasing: This skill involves breaking down continuous speech into distinct units, such as sentences and phrases. For example, in the phrase “Let’s eat, Grandma!” the pause indicates a direct address, while “Let’s eat Grandma!” changes the meaning entirely, illustrating how prosody aids in understanding relationships between words.
• Form-Meaning Mappings: Infants can convey different intentions to caregivers based on prosodic patterns. For instance, a rising intonation at the end of a phrase, as in “Are you coming?”, indicates a question, while a falling intonation in “I’m coming” signifies a statement. This demonstrates how prosodic variations can signal different meanings.

Our research emphasizes three key areas:

• Biologically Motivated Mechanisms: Are infants born with innate abilities that assist in prosodic development?
• Input-Based Learning Mechanisms: How does the language infants hear influence their prosodic development?
• Visual Modality: How do gestures facilitate prosodic learning?

Potential Research Questions

As an intern, you can explore engaging research questions, such as:

• What learning mechanisms drive an infant’s ability to segment phrases from speech?
• Can fetuses utilize associative learning to map prosodic patterns to basic emotions as early as the third trimester?
• How does the availability of visual cues and infants’ attention to them influence prosodic development?

Why Join Us?

These internship opportunities provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into EEG paradigms (e.g., mismatch negativity & closure positive shift paradigms), eye-tracking set-up designed for naturalistic adult-infant interactions, and observational methods to study early language acquisition. You’ll work in a multidisciplinary environment, contributing to research during the critical period when babies begin to learn language. If you’re interested in developmental psychology, linguistics, or neuroscience, this is an ideal chance to combine all three fields and make an impact on our understanding of infant language development.

Interested?

To apply, please send us your CV and a motivation letter at sound.start@uu.nl.