Ioana Goga's PhD plan

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Psychological experiments

Coneural > Ioana Goga > PhD research > Psychological studies

Several sets of psychological studies are meant to collect data for the conceptualization of the action-language model. A final set of experiments will be run to validate the computational hypotheses of the "action <through> language" models.

This work was carried out under the supervision of Dr. Oana Benga from the Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca.

A. Collect linguistic data

We have run a set of studies for the systematic observation of the interaction between a human caregiver and the child during the seriated nesting cups task. In this respect, the original experiment of the seriate cups task was modified in several ways. The demonstrator is replaced by the child caregiver, who interacts with the infant in three different conditions. During the first condition the infant and the caregiver are playing with several toys and nested cups. The second condition is similar to the experimental setting of the original seriated nesting cups task
The caregiver demonstrates the seriation task and also interacts with the child during the imitation phase, by directing her attention and providing feedback on the success of the
task. In the third condition, the caregiver is allowed to freely interact with the infant during the demonstration and imitation periods, using linguistic imperatives and gestures,
in order to guide the infant in building the seriated structure using the most advanced strategy.

7 infants between 12 and 36 months of age were observed and all sessions were recorded on video and transcribed using the CHAT system (Codes forHuman Analysis of Transcripts). The resulted corpus SeriatedCups was contributed to the CHILDES database. Current work of ours is focused on analyzing and segmenting the corpus, in order to extract relevant linguistic sequences from the human child–caregiver interaction and to use them as training input for an action–language computational model.

B. Validate the " action <through> language" models

This set of experiments is meant to validate the hypotheses of the multiple constraints satisfaction model of manipulatory and linguistic skills.