Natalie Boll‐avetisyan

Biographic Data

ID1464089
NAMENatalie Boll‐avetisyan
GIVEN NAMESNatalie
FAMILY NAMEBoll‐avetisyan
SIGNATUREAVETISYAN N B
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Potsdam
ORCID0000-0001-5446-946X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS13
TOTAL CITATIONS4
AUTHOR COUNT13
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2014
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • Is KO OK? Segmentation of Consonant- and Vowel-Initial Words in German-Learning Infants

    Open AccessNatalie Boll‐avetisyan, Tom Fritzsche et al.ARTICLELanguage and Speech2026

    Infants develop the ability to segment words from continuous speech from the age of 6 months onwards. However, in French- and English-learning infants, this ability initially appears to be restricted to consonant-initial words. Vowel-initial word segmentation only emerges at around 13.5 months of age, or at 11 months when additional segmentation cues are provided. Previous research has attributed this asymmetry to phonological and acoustic differ…

  • Tongue root harmony cues for speech segmentation in multilingually raised infants learning languages with and without vowel harmony in Ghana (Africa)

    Open AccessPaul Okyere Omane, Natalie Boll‐avetisyan et al.ARTICLEBilingualism Language and Cognition2025

    This study investigated the hypothesis that 9- to 11-month-old multilingual infants learning Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony languages (such as Akan) alongside other non-vowel harmony languages in Ghana (Africa) can use ATR harmony cues for speech segmentation. Using the central fixation procedure, infants were familiarized with bisyllabic words in two passages, one with ATR cues and one without, and then tested on isolated familiarized and no…

  • Individual Differences in Infants' Speech Segmentation Performance

    Open AccessMonica Vanoncini, Ezgi Kayhan et al.ARTICLEInfancy2025

    Caregiver‐infant coregulation is an early form of communication. This study investigated whether mother‐infant biological coregulation is associated with 9‐month‐olds’ word segmentation performance, a crucial milestone predicting language development. We hypothesized that coregulation would relate with infants' word segmentation performance. Additionally, we examined whether this relationship is influenced by the caregiving environment (i.e., par…

  • Infant preference for specific phonetic cue relations in the contrast between voiced and voiceless stops

    Open AccessMarc Hullebus, Adamantios Gafos et al.ARTICLEInfancy2025

    Acoustic variability in the speech input has been shown, in certain contexts, to be beneficial during infants' acquisition of sound contrasts. One approach attributes this result to the potential of variability to make the stability of individual cues visible. Another approach suggests that, instead of highlighting individual cues, variability uncovers stable relations between cues that signal a sound contrast. Here, we investigate the relation b…

  • Exploring the nature of multilingual input to infants in multiple caregiver families in an African city

    Open AccessPaul Okyere Omane, Titia Benders et al.ARTICLECognitive Development2025

    Examining the language input experiences of infants growing up in multilingual African environments is essential to understanding their language acquisition. We explored the language input to 3;0–12;0-month-old infants ( N = 121) in Ghana (Sub-Saharan Africa), a non-Western and less-economically rich social context and highly multilingual country. Data collection involved an interview assessment, followed by caregivers completing a 12-hour logboo…

  • Infants discriminate subtle nasal contrasts late

    Open AccessRowena Garcia, Michael Valdez et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2025

    Studies suggest that infants initially show universal discrimination abilities. However, this narrative has been heavily based on Indo-European languages. It has also been proposed that infants' speech sound discrimination is affected by acoustic salience, such that acoustically subtle contrasts are not discriminated until the end of an infant's first year. Furthermore, others have suggested an influence of word position and positional frequency …

  • Vowel harmony preferences in infants growing up in multilingual Ghana (Africa)

    Open AccessPaul Okyere Omane, Titia Benders et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2024Cited by: 1

    Infants' preference for vowel harmony (VH, a phonotactic constraint that requires vowels in a word to be featurally similar) is thought to be language-specific: Monolingual infants learning VH languages show a listening preference for VH patterns by 6 months of age, while those learning non-VH languages do not (Gonzalez-Gomez et al., 2019; Van Kampen et al., 2008). We investigated sensitivity to advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony in Akan (Kwa, Ni…

  • Diversifying language acquisition research can be (partly) achieved in urban societies and with simplified methodologies

    Open AccessPaul Okyere Omane, Titia Benders et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2023

    There is a large consensus (e.g., Cristia, Foushee, Aravena-Bravo, Cychosz, Scaff & Casillas, 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022) that diversification in language acquisition research is needed. Cristia et al. (2023) convincingly argue for studying language acquisition in rural populations and recommend combining observational and experimental approaches in doing so. In this commentary, we identify that diversification efforts must also include children g…

  • Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research

    Paulina Aravena-Bravo, Alejandrina Cristia et al.PREPRINT2023

    A survey of diversity in leading language acquisition journals revealed that only 2% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are represented. With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to this literature, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/). /L+/ was a free 5-day virtual school that facilitated the interchange of expertise among early career researche…

  • Rhythmic grouping biases in simultaneous bilinguals

    Open AccessNatalie Boll‐avetisyan, Anjali Bhatara et al.ARTICLEBilingualism Language and Cognition2020

    This study provides a novel approach for testing the universality of perceptual biases by looking at speech processing in simultaneous bilingual adults learning two languages that support the maintenance of this bias to different degrees. Specifically, we investigated the Iambic/Trochaic Law, an assumed universal grouping bias, in simultaneous French–German bilinguals, presenting them with streams of syllables varying in intensity, duration or ne…

  • Language-specific prosodic acquisition

    Open AccessSandrien van Ommen, Natalie Boll‐avetisyan et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2020

  • Is speech processing influenced by abstract or detailed phonotactic representations? The case of the Obligatory Contour Principle

    Open AccessNatalie Boll‐avetisyan, René KagerARTICLELingua2016Cited by: 1References: 39

  • OCP- PLACE in Speech Segmentation

    Open AccessNatalie Boll‐avetisyan, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan et al.ARTICLELanguage and Speech2014Cited by: 2References: 35

    OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lex…