Recording of a father reading for his child. Photo by Språkstudion.
Recording of a father reading for his child. Photo by Språkstudion.

About the research project

How do children learn languages? This question has fascinated researchers and philosophers for centuries,  and is still of great immediate interest in many research areas. The current research project aims to gather more insight by studying voices in the child's closest environment during its first year. The project is a collaboration between Friedrich-Schiller Unversität Jena and Språkstudion, Department of Language Education, and is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG-WE5757, "Akustisch-phonetische Variabilität in kind- und erwachsenengerichteter Sprache bei Eltern während der frühkindlichen Erziehung").

Recordings in Jena and Stockholm

Research data will be gathered from 2016 to 2018. Parents will be recorded in their home environment while reading a text and describing pictures. In total, four recordings will be made during the child's first year. Each meeting will take about 1-1,5 hours.

Would you like to participate?

We are looking for parents-to-be who would like to to participate in the project. To be eligible for participation, you should:

  • be expecting your first child
  • have Swedish as (one of) your native language(s)
  • live in the Stockholm are
  • not have hearing deficiencies or speech impediments

If several parents to the same child wish to participate, you are most welcome to do so (it is, however, not a requirement). Each participant gets 1.500 SEK. Contact us at info@sprakstudion.su.se if you want to know more and/or sign up!

The project group

The research project is lead by PhD Melanie Weirich, post doc at Institut für Germanistiche Sprachwissenschaft, Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena. She did her doctoral studies in phonetics at the Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin, and has worked at ZAS, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenshaft in Berlin. In her scientific work, she has mostly focused on sociophonetic variation in German. She's collaborating on this project with Professor Adrian P. Simpson, who is an English phonetician active in Germany since 1987, and currently vice-President of the International Phonetic Association. His main research interests are phonetic correlates of sex and gender, phonetics and phonology of spontaneous speech and descriptive phonetics

The project assistant at Språkstudion is Jasmine Öjbro. She has an MA in Japanese, and is a former amanuensis at Språkstudion. Her main research interest is language learning. Her  counterpart in Jena is Fabienne Neder. Fabienne studies linguistics and has been working as a student assistent at the Institut for German Linguistics since 2015. Her main research interests are speech science and phonetics.

The head researcher at Språkstudion is Christine Ericsdotter Nordgren, PhD in phonetics and Director of Språkstudion. Her field of research is articulatory modelling and sociophonetics in Swedish, English, German and Italian. Her particular interest in this project lies within the field of sociophonetics of language learning.

The project group: Jasmine Öjbro, Melanie Weirich and Christine Ericsdotter Nordgren. Photo by Språkstudion.
The project group: Jasmine Öjbro, Melanie Weirich and Christine Ericsdotter Nordgren. Photo by Språkstudion.