Exactly! 😀 this is what we think, too. We'll need another study with infants actually co-living with one of them. 😀 It was, however, not too weird to expect they would not be surprised by them speaking. Think of how much young kids love puppet theater etc.

Only if the Furhat showed no social behavior (face and eyes oriented downwards) they recognized its words. This was Lara's MSc project. She will start her PhD project with me @babylab.bsky.social tomorrow.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112... with @davidschlangen.bsky.social

We tested whether infants would learn new words when listening to a speaking "Furhat", a social humanoid robot. Results were unexpected: When the Furhat interacted in a social way with facial expressions, following gaze, the infants later showed no signs of recognizing words the Furhat had said. 2/3

Makes sense, sounds good!

Is there a way for viewing the list without creating a zotero account and without joining the group? That would be useful for undergrad students (and for myself ;)). Asking because I teach a course on the acquisition of underrepresented languages.

Since we tested them on Akan by giving a cue that indicates wors boundaries in Akan, it could be a language-specific cue they are applying. It would indeed be interesting to know if infants transfer the use of this cue to their other languages.

Good question! Akan shows the vowel harmony they used as a cue for finding words in speech, and to most infants this was the only language with vowel harmony. Only 8 of the 40 infants had minimally one more vowel harmony language in their input. % exposure to harmony language had no effect.

They could do so by attending to the vowel patterns in the speech stream (Akan is a vowel harmony language requiring that vowels within a word share specific features). It did not matter whether or not Akan was among the languages they heard more often in their daily lives.

Ist mir egal, macht mir nichts, na und. 🙃