EP #8 | A Child's First Words: Psycholinguistics, Development & Linguistic Communities | Alejandrina Cristia & Camila Scaff

Language is oftentimes viewed as a paradigmatically human capacity. Indeed, we have observed no other creature exhibit linguistic abilities with the same complexity and freedom as our own. Conversely, humans are often viewed as vitally linguistic. Our diverse societies and communities seem to be knit together by the thread of spoken, signed and written words. We tell stories, pass down documents, express our joys and grievances… all by articulating our thoughts into sequences of sounds, markings or gestures. It is therefore not surprising that the first words of a child tend to be celebrated. But what goes into the utterance of a first word? How does this develop into full-fledged linguistic communication? What role does the speech that can be heard in the child’s social environment play? How and why do we speak to children? How does all this vary from one culture to the next? Today's guests are the people to answer these questions, or at least some of them… 

Camilla Scaff is a post-doctoral researcher in the Human Ecology Group, at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is simultaneously doing post doctoral work in the Language Acquisition Across Cultures (LAAC) group, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), here at the Ecole normale supérieure of Paris, where she also did her PhD on the influence of socioeconomic and ecological factors on language acquisition, under the supervision of  Alejandrina Cristia. 

Alejandrina Cristia, then, is a CNRS research director at the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique. Her work is highly integrative, ambitiously bringing together different methods in order to pinpoint the processes by which we speak and understand language. For this work, she won the CNRS bronze medal and the John S. McDonnell Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She received her MA and PhD in linguistics at the University of Purdue. 

Links to the Con Ciencia podcast and the Kotoboo blog referenced in the episode:

Con ciencia:

https://soundcloud.com/radio-unahur/sets/con-ciencia

Kotoboo:

https://kotoboo.org/index.php/fr/

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Rohan Chowdhury

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar