This is a Voice Exhibition at The Museum of Applied Arts and Sceince: Dr Marina Kalashnikova presents Babytalk

 

A new collaborative exhibition between Western Sydney University and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences has opened.

The exhibition features three MARCS Institute researchers, Associate Professor Caroline Jones, Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi and Dr Marina Kalashnikova.

In this video, Dr Kalashnikova discusses her research on BabyTalk or Infant Directed Speech.

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The Conversation: We all need to forget, even robots

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We all know what it’s like to forget something. A loved one’s birthday. A childhood memory. Even people capable of extraordinary memory feats – say, memorising the order of a deck of cards in less than 20 seconds – will still forget where they left their keys. People, it seems, are never in complete control of their memories.

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Featured Publications

Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory
Children adopted early in life into another linguistic community typically forget their birth language but retain, unaware, relevant linguistic knowledge that may facilitate (re)learning of birth language patterns.
The origins of babytalk: smiling, teaching or social convergence?
When addressing their young infants, parents systematically modify their speech. Such infant directed speech contains exaggerated vowel formants, which have been proposed to foster language development via articulation of more distinct speech sounds. Here, this assumption is rigorously tested using both acoustic and, for the first time, fine-grained articulatory measures.