Language Sciences Profile

Would you like to complete your internship in a prestigious institution - Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm - and a dynamic and innovative environment? Come and join our LAAC (Language Acquisition Across Cultures) team.

Description of the Lab:

The Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics Lab (LSCP) is a joint research unit of the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Our laboratory is located in Paris in the Department of Cognitive Studies (DEC) of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. The aim of the research at LSCP is to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying the acquisition and functioning of typical human cognitive functions, such as language, social cognition, and consciousness.

Description of the team:

The aim of our LAAC (Language Acquisition Across Cultures) team is to shed light on the mechanisms and processes involved in early language acquisition in a variety of cultures and language communities. To this end, we use an interdisciplinary approach (ranging from computational modelling to laboratory experiments and advanced data analysis) in the context of open, collaborative and publicly engaged science.

Internship description:

Most research on early language acquisition has documented entry and learning cues in only a handful of cultures, the assumption being that the mechanisms postulated to explain acquisition in these cultures are universal. However, some previous work suggests that the conditions under which young children acquire their mother tongue vary considerably from culture to culture.

Nowadays, it has become relatively easy to do this via small recorders worn by the child for one or more representative days. These large-scale recordings are analysed using a combination of professional linguistic annotation and automated big data analysis.

This allows for more accurate documentation of the “real” input of infants' experience of language in a variety of cultures and social settings.

The team now has a large number of records that need to be annotated to be used. In particular, we are interested in the amount of speech addressed to infants, as well as the characteristics of their speech productions.

Interniship’s objectives:

• Join an interdisciplinary team
• Learn about open and cumulative science (a response to the replication problem).
• Learn to analyse spontaneous speech using high quality tools
• Learn to measure the reliability of annotations
• Experience life in the Lab
• Exposure to research methods in experimental psychology and language sciences

Job location:

LSCP - 29, rue d’Ulm - 75005 Paris; teleworking possible (and may be necessary in the context of COVID19). 

Required profil:

We are looking for full-time interns, minimum 2 months, with the following profile:

• Organised, autonomous, rigorous;
• Knowledge of an annotation tool (e.g. Praat or ELAN) welcome;
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in speech therapy, language sciences, psychology, etc.

Application: 

Submit a motivation letter and a CV to laac.lscp@gmail.com.