Caroline Floccia
Biographic Data
| ID | 1463435 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caroline Floccia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caroline |
| FAMILY NAME | Floccia |
| SIGNATURE | FLOCCIA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Plymouth |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3931-9791 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Adapting language development research paradigms to online testing
During the recent pandemic, it became necessary to adapt lab-based studies to online experiments. To investigate the impact of online testing on the quality of data, we focus on three paradigms widely used in infant research: a word recognition task using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, a word learning task using the Switch task, and a language assessment tool (WinG) where children identify a target word amongst a set of picture car…
Exploring differences between mothers’ and fathers’ language attitudes in multilingual London
This study investigated the language attitudes of parents raising multilingual infants in London. Using a newly developed questionnaire, 131 mothers and fathers rated their attitudes towards their languages across three themes: (1) their emotional resonance with the language, (2) the significance of the language in their personal life, and (3) its importance in bringing up a multilingual child. Parents varied in the combination of languages they …
Vowels and consonants matter equally to British English-learning 11-month-olds’ familiar word form recognition
While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants’ recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing that infants prefer listening to a list of famili…
Tracking the associative boost in infancy
Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head‐turn preference procedure, we show that 18‐month‐old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog‐cat or apple‐cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer‐lasting whe…
An Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI in 17 Arabic Dialects for Children Aged 8 to 30 Months
Assessing a child’s language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months across 17 Arab countries. Departing from the two relevant original Communicative Development Inventory fo…
Translation equivalent and cross-language semantic priming in bilingual toddlers
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…
Gestures and Words in Naming
We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty-seven monolingual children aged 24-30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehensio…
Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified
By the end of their first year of life, infants’ representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. ( ) showed that French‐learning 5‐month‐olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English‐lea…
A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research
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 …
Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words
Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consist…
English-learning one- to two-year-olds do not show a consonant bias in word learning
Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this ambiguity by using an interactive word-learning study similar to that used in French, with British-English-…
Utterance-Final Lengthening Is Predictive of Infants' Discrimination of English Accents
Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that actually facilitate infant discrimination has not been directly examined. We analyzed the accent discri…
Infants’ Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech
This study investigates infants' discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the inf…
Regional and Foreign Accent Processing in English
Morae and Syllables
Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or in the number of sub-syllabic units such as morae. In…
From Initial Speech Perception to Language-Specific Processing
Regional and Foreign Accent Processing in English
Exploring differences between mothers’ and fathers’ language attitudes in multilingual London
This study investigated the language attitudes of parents raising multilingual infants in London. Using a newly developed questionnaire, 131 mothers and fathers rated their attitudes towards their languages across three themes: (1) their emotional resonance with the language, (2) the significance of the language in their personal life, and (3) its importance in bringing up a multilingual child. Parents varied in the combination of languages they …
From Initial Speech Perception to Language-Specific Processing
Morae and Syllables
Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or in the number of sub-syllabic units such as morae. In…
Regional and Foreign Accent Processing in English
Infants’ Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech
This study investigates infants' discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the inf…
English-learning one- to two-year-olds do not show a consonant bias in word learning
Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this ambiguity by using an interactive word-learning study similar to that used in French, with British-English-…
Utterance-Final Lengthening Is Predictive of Infants' Discrimination of English Accents
Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that actually facilitate infant discrimination has not been directly examined. We analyzed the accent discri…
Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words
Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consist…
Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified
By the end of their first year of life, infants’ representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. ( ) showed that French‐learning 5‐month‐olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English‐lea…
A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research
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 …
Gestures and Words in Naming
We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty-seven monolingual children aged 24-30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehensio…
Translation equivalent and cross-language semantic priming in bilingual toddlers
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…
An Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI in 17 Arabic Dialects for Children Aged 8 to 30 Months
Assessing a child’s language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months across 17 Arab countries. Departing from the two relevant original Communicative Development Inventory fo…
Tracking the associative boost in infancy
Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head‐turn preference procedure, we show that 18‐month‐old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog‐cat or apple‐cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer‐lasting whe…
Vowels and consonants matter equally to British English-learning 11-month-olds’ familiar word form recognition
While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants’ recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing that infants prefer listening to a list of famili…
Adapting language development research paradigms to online testing
During the recent pandemic, it became necessary to adapt lab-based studies to online experiments. To investigate the impact of online testing on the quality of data, we focus on three paradigms widely used in infant research: a word recognition task using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, a word learning task using the Switch task, and a language assessment tool (WinG) where children identify a target word amongst a set of picture car…
Exploring differences between mothers’ and fathers’ language attitudes in multilingual London
This study investigated the language attitudes of parents raising multilingual infants in London. Using a newly developed questionnaire, 131 mothers and fathers rated their attitudes towards their languages across three themes: (1) their emotional resonance with the language, (2) the significance of the language in their personal life, and (3) its importance in bringing up a multilingual child. Parents varied in the combination of languages they …
Psychology (17 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Language Development and Disorders (14 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (8 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (7 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (6 works) · Developmental psychology (6 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works)