EyeHub "Seed" Funding: Funded projects 2024

Erik Kjos Fonn 

In order to avoid conflict and to create and sustain cooperative bonds, humans must have some understanding of who owns what and act on this in appropriate ways. The study of human ownership understanding has accordingly received considerable attention in developmental psychology, but it remains unknown if even preverbal infants understand and represent ownership. Using classic looking time violation-of-expectation methods, we have now successful pilot data indicating that 10–13 month-old infants indeed expect agents to have privileged access to their previously possessed resources, suggesting a nascent understanding of ownership. In the current project we propose to triangulate these findings using violation-of-expectation pupillometry and anticipatory looking methods.

Marianna Kyriacou

Evidence from research suggests that children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have reading comprehension impairments, presumably due to increased distractibility and difficulties concentrating. These impairments are mostly prominent when comprehension is measured by asking children to recall or pick out central ideas in stories after reading a text (Parks et al., 2022). Little is known about how ADHD may affect reading behaviour and comprehension in real-time (i.e., while reading), or how attention is allocated to different sources of information, such as text or storybook illustrations. Findings suggest that too many illustrations can significantly hinder comprehension, while minimal, story-relevant illustrations may significantly improve it (Eng et al., 2020). Importantly, we currently do not know how illustrations may affect both reading comprehension and eye movements in novice readers with ADHD, nor how attention is divided among competing sources of information. For example, it might be that children with ADHD have more difficulty ignoring irrelevant stimuli compared to typically developing children, further inhibiting their reading performance. If successful, we intend to use the EyeHub seed funding to design and conduct an eye-tracking reading task with authentic illustrated storybooks, to investigate the reading behaviour, comprehension, and attention allocation in children with ADHD versus typically developing children. Our study will lead to a better understanding of how attention deficits affect reading performance. In addition, the results have significant practical implications, contributing to the development of instructional materials specifically tailored for children with ADHD.

Alexandra Bogoyavlenskaya

Decades of research have illuminated infants' abilities to extract structured patterns from sensory experiences, yet uncertainties persist regarding the factors facilitating the generalization of linguistic patterns in early language learning. This project investigates whether infants process abstract rules differently when exposed to novel spoken sequences from one or multiple speakers, hypothesizing that diverse sources enhance their ability to abstract and generalize rules. In a novel approach, eye tracking technology is employed to study Norwegian-learning infants aged 7.0–7.99 months, introducing a fresh perspective to the field. The study design involves a familiarization phase exposing infants to distinct syllable sequences and a subsequent test phase with novel speakers uttering sequences following specific rules. Predictions suggest differential sensitivity to sequences based on social value, indicating a potential novelty preference. The methodological innovation lies in the application of eye tracking in the context of speaker variation in statistical language learning in infants. The project aims to contribute to language acquisition theories, emphasizing the social and communicative factors influencing early language learning. The deliverable, a journal article for a high-impact scientific journal, aligns with the project's goal of advancing innovative research in the emerging field and will be shared within the EyeHub community, promoting multidisciplinary skills among linguistics students.

Audun Rosslund

The theory of perceptual narrowing proposes that infants come into the world sensitive to a wide range of speech sounds, and gradually, within their first year, become attuned to the speech in their native language, while losing the ability to distinguish contrasts not present in their language (Werker & Tees, 1984). However, empirical evidence for this claim predominantly comes from English-speaking infants (Singh et al., 2022), with a majority of studies using manual, error-prone experimental procedures, and few studies have examined both native and non-native discrimination with the same infants – a necessity to capture potential fine-grained shifts in perception within individuals. With the current project, we aim to adress these limitations and further test the perceptual narrowing theory by examining native and non-native vowel discrimination in Norwegian infants from two different age groups (4-month-olds and 36-month-olds), that are expected to be on each side of perceptual narrowing. Moreover, we will do this using an automatised eye-tracking procedure and by analysing complementary measures of both looking time as well as pupillary responses.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum

Grice’s Maxim of Manner entreats speakers to ‘avoid obscurity of expression’, ‘avoid ambiguity’, ‘be brief’ and ‘be orderly’ (Grice, 1975). For instance, if a speaker says, ‘that idea is not impossible’, she implies that it is not straightforwardly possible, otherwise she would have used the synonymous but briefer alternative, ‘possible’. The few studies with adults provide emerging evidence that hearers do sometimes derive manner implicatures, but we know little about how children acquire these pragmatic inferences. Manner implicatures present an interesting case in revealing how aspects of children’s cognitive development interact with their pragmatic competence. In particular, a rich literature documents children’s development of conventionality, not only linguistically but across a range of areas such as object functions or game rules (see Diesendruck, 2011 for an overview). This may include a stage of heightened sensitivity to convention (Falkum, 2022). While both unmarked and marked forms are conventional in that they are comprehended at the literal level, marked forms are also less conventional: speakers do not expect them to be used for that meaning as much, because they are less frequent in context. Together with what we know about the developmental trajectories of other implicature types, this gives rise to two opposing hypotheses. On the first hypothesis, children follow an inverted U-shape in rates of manner inferences. On the second hypothesis, children reach adult-like rates of manner inferences relatively late. The goal of the study is to test these two hypotheses.

Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos

This projects investigates the role of social co-presence when understanding expressive language (such as the words 'damn' or 'fuck'). Whereas existing theories have studied how individual languague users understand these words, the current study explores the possibility that the mental representations change as a function of whether language users are alone or in a social environment with other people.