Me Anne S. Warlaumont

Assistant Professor
Cognitive and Information Sciences
University of California, Merced
awarlaumont2@ucmerced.edu or anne.warlaumont@gmail.com
Curriculum vitae (includes links to papers)

Research projects:

~ Neural network modeling of motor speech development in infancy. This paper from the AISB'11 proceedings addresses the roles of self-perception and external input in learning to imitate. I have a model of how reinforcement can be used to modulate synaptic and neuromotor plasticity, leading to the development of prespeech vocalization abilities like phonatory control and babbling as well as language-specific adaptation of vowel spaces (see this presentation—use right and left keyboard arrows to click through, and turn on your volume to hear the sound examples), and lately I've been working on a model of the development of canonical babbling that uses a spiking neural network that learns through reinforcement (see this paper to appear in the 2012 ICDL-EpiRob proceedings). My modeling work is mainly done in MATLAB, making use of Paul Boersma's articulatory synthesizer, available in Praat.

~ Investigating dynamics of infants' vocal exploration of vocal interaction between children and caregivers in day-long naturalistic LENA recordings. We are finding some interesting differences with age and associated with autism (see this paper from the CogSci 2010 proceedings and a workshop I recently gave  at a TIMELY training school).

~ Modeling the evolution of reflexive primate calls (here's a presentation on that work).

~ Development of online software for learning to categorize pre-speech infant vocalizations, and analysis of parent diary reports on these sounds. Visit babyvoc.org to check out the software

~ The perception and classification of vocalizations by adult listeners, and modeling this through automated analysis by neural networks (see this poster from ICIS 2010 and this paper in JASA).

~ The frequency of lexical and morphosyntactic items in the speech of caregivers and typical, language delayed, and language impaired children. See this paper in the Journal of Child Language.

Email me if you'd like my code or other materials from any of these projects.

I'm currently looking to recruit a PhD student, and I also have openings for undergraduate research assistants. Please email me if you think you might be interested! Information about the UC Merced Cognitive and Information Sciences PhD program, including how to apply, can be found here.

I did my graduate work at the University of Memphis,  funded by a U.S. Dept. of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. See the piece on my work in the 2011 edition of DEIXIS magazine (it starts on p. 13). As part of the DOE CSGF program, I got to spend a summer at Argonne National Lab (supervised by Mark Hereld) and the University of Chicago. My work there focused on comparing realistic and simplified computational models in their ability to model neocortical dynamics in epilepsy.

Current and past collaborators:
           
Kim Oller (my PhD advisor), Eugene Buder (my secondary PhD advisor), and Linda Jarmulowicz (The University of Memphis, Communication Sciences and Disorders)
Gert Westermann (Lancaster University, Psychology)
Andrew Olney (The University of Memphis, Psychology)
Rick Dale (University of California, Merced)
Robert Kozma (The University of Memphis, Math)
Mark Hereld (Argonne National Lab, Math and Computer Science)
Wim van Drongelen and Marc Benayoun (University of Chicago, Pediatric Neurology)
Jill Gilkerson, Jeff Richards, and Dongxin Xu (The LENA Foundation)
Shimon Edelman (my honors thesis advisor) and Claudia Gilson Hunter (Cornell University, Psychology)

Last updated October 16, 2012