Elika Bergelson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1463432 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elika Bergelson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elika |
| FAMILY NAME | Bergelson |
| SIGNATURE | BERGELSON E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2742-4797 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The spectrum of communication abilities in children with 12 rare neurodevelopmental disorders: A qualitative study with caregivers
BACKGROUND: Our aim was to update an existing model of communication ability for children with rare neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) by centring caregiver and family perspectives. This project is part of a larger initiative to improve the measurement of communication ability for these children in the context of clinical trials. METHODS: We conducted concept elicitation interviews with purposively selected clinical experts and caregivers of chi…
The Development of Canonical Proportion as a Function of Community, Multilingualism, and Target Language’s Syllable Complexity
This study investigates the development of canonical proportion (CP), an indicator of speech development, across diverse language and environmental contexts. Using the Speech Maturity Dataset (SMD) comprising 366 children, aged 0;2-6;4, across 10 different languages and cultures, we explore the influence of multilingual exposure, language syllable complexity, and community type (industrialised, non-industrialised) on CP. We find that monolingual …
Early child measures outpredict input measures of preschool language skills in U.S. English learners
Prior work finds that some elements of language input or skills during infancy and toddlerhood predict later language skills. Here, we ask if combining these two sources of information about early language development improves predictions of language outcomes, using a longitudinal data set that captures early language input and abilities over the first 5 years in a sample of 44 American English-learning children. While several early language skil…
Measuring early word exposure in infants: A brief parent-report survey captures individual language input and predicts vocabulary outcomes
Individual differences in early language input are rampant but hard to quantify without resource-intensive naturalistic recordings, posing a challenge for testing links between individual experience and facets of language development like vocabulary growth. We tested whether a quick parent survey on infants' exposure to common nouns could reliably predict nouns' frequency in home recordings (testing its validity) and children's own vocabulary (te…
Children’s expressive and receptive knowledge of the English regular plural
We investigate how children form early grammatical generalizations using the test case of the English regular plural. While some previous studies demonstrate that children apply abstract grammatical rules to produce novel plurals before 24 months, other studies have revealed that children use plural forms inconsistently with familiar and novel nouns and demonstrate limited or variable receptive plural knowledge through 36 months. This is at odds …
Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind
We investigate the roles of linguistic and sensory experience in the early-produced visual, auditory, and abstract words of congenitally-blind toddlers, deaf toddlers, and typically-sighted/hearing peers. We also assess the role of language access by comparing early word production in children learning English or American Sign Language (ASL) from birth, versus at a delay. Using parental report data on child word production from the MacArthur-Bate…
A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences
We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2–36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting…
Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning (Rise): Scalable online replications of key findings in infant cognitive development
The current article describes the Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning, a battery intended to provide robust looking time measures of cognitive development that can be administered remotely to inform our understanding of individual developmental trajectories in typical and atypical populations, particularly infant siblings of autistic children. This battery was developed to inform our understanding of early cognitive and language development i…
Supporting Early Language by Supporting Systemic Solutions
A large body of research shows connections between infants’ and toddlers’ home language input and a wide range of receptive and expressive early language skills. Some facets of caretaker input and early language skills are associated with socioeconomic status (SES), though not all. Given the complexity of language learning, language use, and its many pathways of connection to SES, testing causal links between these dimensions is difficult at best…
Wordform variability in infants’ language environment and its effects on early word learning
Language science outreach through schools and social media: Critical considerations
As researchers who rely on federal funding and community participation, we have an obligation to return scientific knowledge to the community. Our outreach goals are to share information about language development and sensory impairments, introduce language science to future scientists, distribute scientific results accessibly, and illuminate the breadth of what science and scientists look like. We seek to achieve this in two ways: by sharing abo…
Establishing the reliability of metrics extracted from long-form recordings using Lena and the Aclew pipeline
Long-form audio recordings are increasingly used to study individual variation, group differences, and many other topics in theoretical and applied fields of developmental science, particularly for the description of children's language input (typically speech from adults) and children's language output (ranging from babble to sentences). The proprietary LENA software has been available for over a decade, and with it, users have come to rely on d…
Analyzing the effect of sibling number on input and output in the first 18 months
Prior research suggests that across a wide range of cognitive, educational, and health‐based measures, first‐born children outperform their later‐born peers. Expanding on this literature using naturalistic home‐recorded data and parental vocabulary reports, we find that early language outcomes vary by number of siblings in a sample of 43 English‐learning U.S. children from mid‐to‐high socioeconomic status homes. More specifically, we find that ch…
Talking to talkers: Infants' talk status, but not their gender, is related to language input
Prior research points to gender differences in some early language skills, but is inconclusive about the mechanisms at play, providing evidence that both infants' early input and productions may differ by gender. This study examined the linguistic input and early productions of 44 American English-learning infants (93% White) in a longitudinal sample of home recordings collected at 6–17 months (in 2014–2016). Girls produced more unique words than…
How adults understand what young children say
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how adult listeners' inferences reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework for modelling spoken word recognition, we find that computational model…
Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in 18–26-month-olds’ representations of how words sound
Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents
Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival1,2. And yet, language is variable across individuals. Behavioral and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status3, children’s gender4, and multilingualism5. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here we leverage speech tech…
Talker variability shapes early word representations in English‐learning 8‐month‐olds
Infants must form appropriately specific representations of how words sound and what they mean. Previous research suggests that while 8‐month‐olds are learning words, they struggle with recognizing different‐sounding instances of words (e.g., from new talkers) and with rejecting incorrect pronunciations. We asked how adding talker variability during learning may change infants’ ability to learn and recognize words. Monolingual English‐learning 7‐…
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 con…
Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning
Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we present a framework …
From babble to words: Infants’ early productions match words and objects in their environment
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) as…
A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system
Familiarity plays a small role in noun comprehension at 12–18 months
Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with particular items, each of which is representative of a broader category that often shares perceptual features. Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels to new category members. While young infants have been found to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role of item familiarity has not been well examined. This study compares 12‐ to 18‐month‐olds’ word comprehens…
The Interspeech 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: Styrian Dialects, Continuous Sleepiness, Baby Sounds & Orca Activity
The INTERSPEECH 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Styrian Dialects Sub-Challenge, three types of Austrian-German dialects have to be classified; in the Continuous Sleepiness Sub-Challenge, the sleepiness of a speaker has to be assessed as regression problem; in the Baby Sound Sub-Challenge, five types of infant sounds ha…
Point, walk, talk: Links between three early milestones, from observation and parental report
Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation and parental report. We examine pointing, walking, and talking in a sample of 44 infants studied lon…
Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning
Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we present a framework …
At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns
It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others’ goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about …
A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility, Best Practices, and Theory‐Building
The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive …
The Interspeech 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: Styrian Dialects, Continuous Sleepiness, Baby Sounds & Orca Activity
The INTERSPEECH 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Styrian Dialects Sub-Challenge, three types of Austrian-German dialects have to be classified; in the Continuous Sleepiness Sub-Challenge, the sleepiness of a speaker has to be assessed as regression problem; in the Baby Sound Sub-Challenge, five types of infant sounds ha…
Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered recordings in various language environments using language-independent syllabification of speech
Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are substan…
A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lenatm) system
In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA^®^ system, which aims to assess children's language environment. While the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts, on only some of its key characteristics. H…
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'' versus "ee''). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported t…
Mothers’ Work Status and 17‐Month‐Olds’ Productive Vocabulary
Literature examining the effects of mothers’ work status on infant language development is mixed, with little focus on varying work schedules and early vocabulary. We use naturalistic data to analyze the productive vocabulary of 44 17‐month‐olds in relation to mothers’ work status (full time, part time, stay at home) at 6 and 18 months. Infants who experienced a combination of care from mothers and other caretakers had larger productive vocabular…
Point, walk, talk: Links between three early milestones, from observation and parental report
Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation and parental report. We examine pointing, walking, and talking in a sample of 44 infants studied lon…
From babble to words: Infants’ early productions match words and objects in their environment
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) as…
A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system
Familiarity plays a small role in noun comprehension at 12–18 months
Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with particular items, each of which is representative of a broader category that often shares perceptual features. Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels to new category members. While young infants have been found to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role of item familiarity has not been well examined. This study compares 12‐ to 18‐month‐olds’ word comprehens…
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 con…
Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning
Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we present a framework …
Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in 18–26-month-olds’ representations of how words sound
Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents
Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival1,2. And yet, language is variable across individuals. Behavioral and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status3, children’s gender4, and multilingualism5. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here we leverage speech tech…
Talker variability shapes early word representations in English‐learning 8‐month‐olds
Infants must form appropriately specific representations of how words sound and what they mean. Previous research suggests that while 8‐month‐olds are learning words, they struggle with recognizing different‐sounding instances of words (e.g., from new talkers) and with rejecting incorrect pronunciations. We asked how adding talker variability during learning may change infants’ ability to learn and recognize words. Monolingual English‐learning 7‐…
Talking to talkers: Infants' talk status, but not their gender, is related to language input
Prior research points to gender differences in some early language skills, but is inconclusive about the mechanisms at play, providing evidence that both infants' early input and productions may differ by gender. This study examined the linguistic input and early productions of 44 American English-learning infants (93% White) in a longitudinal sample of home recordings collected at 6–17 months (in 2014–2016). Girls produced more unique words than…
How adults understand what young children say
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how adult listeners' inferences reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework for modelling spoken word recognition, we find that computational model…
Supporting Early Language by Supporting Systemic Solutions
A large body of research shows connections between infants’ and toddlers’ home language input and a wide range of receptive and expressive early language skills. Some facets of caretaker input and early language skills are associated with socioeconomic status (SES), though not all. Given the complexity of language learning, language use, and its many pathways of connection to SES, testing causal links between these dimensions is difficult at best…
Wordform variability in infants’ language environment and its effects on early word learning
Language science outreach through schools and social media: Critical considerations
As researchers who rely on federal funding and community participation, we have an obligation to return scientific knowledge to the community. Our outreach goals are to share information about language development and sensory impairments, introduce language science to future scientists, distribute scientific results accessibly, and illuminate the breadth of what science and scientists look like. We seek to achieve this in two ways: by sharing abo…
Establishing the reliability of metrics extracted from long-form recordings using Lena and the Aclew pipeline
Long-form audio recordings are increasingly used to study individual variation, group differences, and many other topics in theoretical and applied fields of developmental science, particularly for the description of children's language input (typically speech from adults) and children's language output (ranging from babble to sentences). The proprietary LENA software has been available for over a decade, and with it, users have come to rely on d…
Analyzing the effect of sibling number on input and output in the first 18 months
Prior research suggests that across a wide range of cognitive, educational, and health‐based measures, first‐born children outperform their later‐born peers. Expanding on this literature using naturalistic home‐recorded data and parental vocabulary reports, we find that early language outcomes vary by number of siblings in a sample of 43 English‐learning U.S. children from mid‐to‐high socioeconomic status homes. More specifically, we find that ch…
Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind
We investigate the roles of linguistic and sensory experience in the early-produced visual, auditory, and abstract words of congenitally-blind toddlers, deaf toddlers, and typically-sighted/hearing peers. We also assess the role of language access by comparing early word production in children learning English or American Sign Language (ASL) from birth, versus at a delay. Using parental report data on child word production from the MacArthur-Bate…
Language Development and Disorders (25 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (14 works) · Developmental psychology (13 works) · Language acquisition (10 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Language development (9 works)