This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential pred... more This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential predictors of Quebec-based parents’ attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Such attitudes are assumed to constitute a determinant of parental language choices, and thereby influence children’s multilingual development. The newly-developed Attitudes towards Childhood Multilingualism Questionnaire was used to gather data from 826 participants raising an infant/toddler aged 0-4 years with multiple languages. The results reveal three separate dimensions: status and solidarity (the same dimensions found in attitudes towards individual languages) as well as cognitive development (not previously attested as a separate dimension). The study thus advances knowledge regarding the dimensionality of attitudes. Participants’ approach to promoting multilingualism and the combination of languages transmitted – and specifically, whether this included a heritage language – correlated significantly with...
The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, col... more The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters.
Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we measured pre-attentive processing involved in nat... more Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we measured pre-attentive processing involved in native vowel perception as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) in monolingual and simultaneous bilingual (SB) users of Canadian English and Canadian French in response to various pairings of four vowels: English /u/, French /u/, French /y/, and a control /y/. The monolingual listeners exhibited a discrimination pattern that was shaped by their native language experience. The SB listeners, on the other hand, exhibited a MMN pattern that was distinct from both monolingual listener groups, suggesting that the SB pre-attentive system is tuned to access sub-phonemic detail with respect to both input languages, including detail that is not readily accessed by either of their monolingual peers. Additionally, SBs exhibited sensitivity to language context generated by the standard vowel in the MMN paradigm. The automatic access to fine phonetic detail may aid SB listeners to rapidly adjust their perception to the variable listening conditions that they frequently encounter.
Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingu... more Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. Overall, rates of infant-directed code-switching were low, averaging 7 times per hour (6 times per 1,000 words) at 10 months and increasing to 28 times per hour (18 times per 1,000 words) at 18 months. Parents code-switched more between sentences than within a sentence; this pattern was even more pronounced when infants were 18 months than when they were 10 months. The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant’s understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual l...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016
Many studies show that listeners are more accurate at identifying talkers in their native languag... more Many studies show that listeners are more accurate at identifying talkers in their native language than in an unfamiliar language; yet, little is known about the nature of this language familiarity effect in bilingual speech. Here, we investigate the links between language and talker processing further by assessing listeners’ ability to identify bilingual talkers across languages. Two groups were recruited: English monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Participants learned to identify bilinguals speaking in only one language (English); they were then tested on their ability to identify the same talkers speaking in the trained language (same language context: English) and in their other language (different language context: French). Both monolinguals and bilinguals showed above chance performance in identifying talkers in both language contexts at test, confirming that there is sufficient information in bilingual speech to generalize across languages. Moreover, the results showed a language context e...
The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and ... more The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability. Infancy researchers face specific challenges related to replicability: high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations, amongst other factors. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multi-site study aimed at 1) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically-important phenomenon and 2) examining methodological, situational, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult were created using semi-naturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings in North American English. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using...
This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a wa... more This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a way of influencing children’s language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and parent-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with information about multilingual child-rearing). This study focused on the awareness and use of, as well as the desire for, such resources among Québec-based parents (n=819) raising infants/toddlers (0-4 years) with multiple languages in the home. Data were collected with a questionnaire. Quantitative data were analyzed statistically, and qualitative data were analyzed using a computer assisted discourse study. We compared parents transmitting at least one immigrant heritage language – usually in addition to English and/or French (HL parents), and parents transmitting only English and French (non-HL...
Speech perceivers are universally biased toward ''focal" vowels (i.e., vowels whose adjacent form... more Speech perceivers are universally biased toward ''focal" vowels (i.e., vowels whose adjacent formants are close in frequency, which concentrates acoustic energy into a narrower spectral region). This bias is demonstrated in phonetic discrimination tasks as a directional asymmetry: a change from a relatively less to a relatively more focal vowel results in significantly better performance than a change in the reverse direction. We investigated whether the critical information for this directional effect is limited to the auditory modality, or whether visible articulatory information provided by the speaker's face also plays a role. Unimodal auditory and visual as well as bimodal (auditory-visual) vowel stimuli were created from video recordings of a speaker producing variants of /u/, differing in both their degree of focalization and visible lip rounding (i.e., lip compression and protrusion). In Experiment 1, we confirmed that subjects showed an asymmetry while discriminating the auditory vowel stimuli. We then found, in Experiment 2, a similar asymmetry when subjects lipread those same vowels. In Experiment 3, we found asymmetries, comparable to those found for unimodal vowels, for bimodal vowels when the audio and visual channels were phonetically-congruent. In contrast, when the audio and visual channels were phonetically-incongruent (as in the ''McGurk effect"), this asymmetry was disrupted. These findings collectively suggest that the perceptual processes underlying the ''focal" vowel bias are sensitive to articulatory information available across sensory modalities, and raise foundational issues concerning the extent to which vowel perception derives from general-auditory or speech-gesture-specific processes.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1998
German‐learning infants were tested for discrimination of four German vowel contrasts in the Sile... more German‐learning infants were tested for discrimination of four German vowel contrasts in the Silent Center paradigm to examine which acoustic properties of coarticulated vowels (target‐spectral, dynamic‐spectral) define vowel identity in prelingual infants. Acoustic analyses of naturally produced original syllables (/dVt/ with V=/i, e, I, E, o, U/) revealed no vowel inherent spectral change but only formant movement associated with the gestures for the initial and final consonants. The original syllables were electronically modified to obtain test syllables which contained target‐spectral information (the vowel nucleus only), only initial or only final formant transitions, or initial and final transitions in their appropriate temporal relationship, with the vowel nucleus attenuated to silence. Four groups of ten infants each (aged 7–11 months) were tested in the conditioned headturn procedure for discrimination of the test syllables. Each group was tested on one of four contrasts (/i/–/e/, /e/–/I/, /E/–/I...
Asymmetries in vowel perception occur such that discrimination of a vowel change presented in one... more Asymmetries in vowel perception occur such that discrimination of a vowel change presented in one direction is easier compared to the same change presented in the reverse direction. Although such effects have been repeatedly reported in the literature there has been little effort to explain when or why they occur. We review studies that report asymmetries in vowel perception in infants and propose that these data indicate that babies are predisposed to respond differently to vowels that occupy different positions in the articulatory/acoustic vowel space (defined by F1-F2) such that the more peripheral vowel within a contrast serves as a reference or perceptual anchor. As such, these asymmetries reveal a language-universal perceptual bias that infants bring to the task of vowel discrimination. We present some new data that support our peripherality hypothesis and then compare the data on asymmetries in human infants with findings obtained with birds and cats. This comparison suggests that asymmetries evident in humans are unlikely to reflect general auditory mechanisms. Several important directions for further research are outlined and some potential implications of these asymmetries for understanding speech development are discussed.
Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is ... more Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is shaped by experience listening to a specific language or language type. This issue was explored by comparing segmentation of bi-syllabic words in monolingual and bilingual 7.5-month-old learners of French and English. In a native-language condition, monolingual infants segmented bi-syllabic words with the predominant stress pattern of their native language. Monolingual French infants also segmented in a different dialect of French, whereas both monolingual groups failed in a cross-language test, i.e. English infants failed to segment in French and vice versa. These findings support the hypothesis that word segmentation is shaped by infant sensitivity to the rhythmic structure of their native language. Our finding that bilingual infants segment bi-syllabic words in two native languages at the same age as their monolingual peers shows that dual language exposure does not delay the emergenc...
Formant frequency convergence (or “focalization”) and linguistic experience interact to shape the... more Formant frequency convergence (or “focalization”) and linguistic experience interact to shape the perception of vowels in adulthood. Here, we provide evidence of the effects of formant proximities and language experience at subcortical levels of the auditory pathway. Using a passive oddball/reversed oddball paradigm, the frequency-following response (FFR) in the auditory brainstem was elicited in sixteen healthy monolingual English speakers by a less-focal/English prototypic /u/ and a more-focal/French prototypic /u/. We examined the FFR as a function of stimulus type (English vs. French prototype) and condition (Standard vs. Deviant). A cross-correlation analysis revealed higher overall similarity between the FFR and evoking stimulus for the English prototype than the French prototype, suggesting an effect of language experience. Yet, deviants exhibited higher correlational values than standards. This effect was largely driven by the French prototype, suggesting an influence of foc...
Behavioral studies examining vowel perception in infancy indicate that, for many vowel contrasts,... more Behavioral studies examining vowel perception in infancy indicate that, for many vowel contrasts, the ease of discrimination changes depending on the order of stimulus presentation, regardless of the language from which the contrast is drawn and the ambient language that infants have experienced. By adulthood, linguistic experience has altered vowel perception; analogous asymmetries are observed for non−native contrasts but are mitigated for native contrasts. Although these directional effects are well documented behaviorally, the brain mechanisms underlying them are poorly understood. In the present study we begin to address this gap. We first review recent behavioral work which shows that vowel perception asymmetries derive from phonetic encoding strategies, rather than general auditory processes. Two existing theoretical models–the Natural Referent Vowel framework and the Native Language Magnet model–are invoked as a means of interpreting these findings. Then we present the resul...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
Directional asymmetries in vowel discrimination studies reveal that speech perceivers (both adult... more Directional asymmetries in vowel discrimination studies reveal that speech perceivers (both adult and infant) are biased toward extreme vocalic articulations, which lead to acoustic vowel signals with well-defined spectral prominences due to formant convergence. These directional effects occur with vowel stimuli presented in either the acoustic or the visual modality and are independent of specific linguistic experience. Current research is focused on elucidating the perceptual processes underlying this universal vowel bias. In the present investigation, the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) in AX discrimination tasks for unimodal acoustic and visual vowels was manipulated (500 ms vs. 1000 ms) in order to examine whether asymmetries are present under experimental conditions that reduce demands on attention and working memory. Subjects discriminated either video-only or audio-only tokens of naturally-spoken English [u] and French [u] which differ in their degree of visible lip-rounding and proximity between F1...
Mother-infant synchrony has been observed very early in the development in the form of coordinate... more Mother-infant synchrony has been observed very early in the development in the form of coordinated biological rhythms, body movements, gaze orientation, facial expression, emotional
This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential pred... more This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential predictors of Quebec-based parents’ attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Such attitudes are assumed to constitute a determinant of parental language choices, and thereby influence children’s multilingual development. The newly-developed Attitudes towards Childhood Multilingualism Questionnaire was used to gather data from 826 participants raising an infant/toddler aged 0-4 years with multiple languages. The results reveal three separate dimensions: status and solidarity (the same dimensions found in attitudes towards individual languages) as well as cognitive development (not previously attested as a separate dimension). The study thus advances knowledge regarding the dimensionality of attitudes. Participants’ approach to promoting multilingualism and the combination of languages transmitted – and specifically, whether this included a heritage language – correlated significantly with...
The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, col... more The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters.
Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we measured pre-attentive processing involved in nat... more Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we measured pre-attentive processing involved in native vowel perception as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) in monolingual and simultaneous bilingual (SB) users of Canadian English and Canadian French in response to various pairings of four vowels: English /u/, French /u/, French /y/, and a control /y/. The monolingual listeners exhibited a discrimination pattern that was shaped by their native language experience. The SB listeners, on the other hand, exhibited a MMN pattern that was distinct from both monolingual listener groups, suggesting that the SB pre-attentive system is tuned to access sub-phonemic detail with respect to both input languages, including detail that is not readily accessed by either of their monolingual peers. Additionally, SBs exhibited sensitivity to language context generated by the standard vowel in the MMN paradigm. The automatic access to fine phonetic detail may aid SB listeners to rapidly adjust their perception to the variable listening conditions that they frequently encounter.
Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingu... more Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. Overall, rates of infant-directed code-switching were low, averaging 7 times per hour (6 times per 1,000 words) at 10 months and increasing to 28 times per hour (18 times per 1,000 words) at 18 months. Parents code-switched more between sentences than within a sentence; this pattern was even more pronounced when infants were 18 months than when they were 10 months. The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant’s understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual l...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016
Many studies show that listeners are more accurate at identifying talkers in their native languag... more Many studies show that listeners are more accurate at identifying talkers in their native language than in an unfamiliar language; yet, little is known about the nature of this language familiarity effect in bilingual speech. Here, we investigate the links between language and talker processing further by assessing listeners’ ability to identify bilingual talkers across languages. Two groups were recruited: English monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Participants learned to identify bilinguals speaking in only one language (English); they were then tested on their ability to identify the same talkers speaking in the trained language (same language context: English) and in their other language (different language context: French). Both monolinguals and bilinguals showed above chance performance in identifying talkers in both language contexts at test, confirming that there is sufficient information in bilingual speech to generalize across languages. Moreover, the results showed a language context e...
The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and ... more The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability. Infancy researchers face specific challenges related to replicability: high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations, amongst other factors. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multi-site study aimed at 1) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically-important phenomenon and 2) examining methodological, situational, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult were created using semi-naturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings in North American English. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using...
This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a wa... more This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a way of influencing children’s language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and parent-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with information about multilingual child-rearing). This study focused on the awareness and use of, as well as the desire for, such resources among Québec-based parents (n=819) raising infants/toddlers (0-4 years) with multiple languages in the home. Data were collected with a questionnaire. Quantitative data were analyzed statistically, and qualitative data were analyzed using a computer assisted discourse study. We compared parents transmitting at least one immigrant heritage language – usually in addition to English and/or French (HL parents), and parents transmitting only English and French (non-HL...
Speech perceivers are universally biased toward ''focal" vowels (i.e., vowels whose adjacent form... more Speech perceivers are universally biased toward ''focal" vowels (i.e., vowels whose adjacent formants are close in frequency, which concentrates acoustic energy into a narrower spectral region). This bias is demonstrated in phonetic discrimination tasks as a directional asymmetry: a change from a relatively less to a relatively more focal vowel results in significantly better performance than a change in the reverse direction. We investigated whether the critical information for this directional effect is limited to the auditory modality, or whether visible articulatory information provided by the speaker's face also plays a role. Unimodal auditory and visual as well as bimodal (auditory-visual) vowel stimuli were created from video recordings of a speaker producing variants of /u/, differing in both their degree of focalization and visible lip rounding (i.e., lip compression and protrusion). In Experiment 1, we confirmed that subjects showed an asymmetry while discriminating the auditory vowel stimuli. We then found, in Experiment 2, a similar asymmetry when subjects lipread those same vowels. In Experiment 3, we found asymmetries, comparable to those found for unimodal vowels, for bimodal vowels when the audio and visual channels were phonetically-congruent. In contrast, when the audio and visual channels were phonetically-incongruent (as in the ''McGurk effect"), this asymmetry was disrupted. These findings collectively suggest that the perceptual processes underlying the ''focal" vowel bias are sensitive to articulatory information available across sensory modalities, and raise foundational issues concerning the extent to which vowel perception derives from general-auditory or speech-gesture-specific processes.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1998
German‐learning infants were tested for discrimination of four German vowel contrasts in the Sile... more German‐learning infants were tested for discrimination of four German vowel contrasts in the Silent Center paradigm to examine which acoustic properties of coarticulated vowels (target‐spectral, dynamic‐spectral) define vowel identity in prelingual infants. Acoustic analyses of naturally produced original syllables (/dVt/ with V=/i, e, I, E, o, U/) revealed no vowel inherent spectral change but only formant movement associated with the gestures for the initial and final consonants. The original syllables were electronically modified to obtain test syllables which contained target‐spectral information (the vowel nucleus only), only initial or only final formant transitions, or initial and final transitions in their appropriate temporal relationship, with the vowel nucleus attenuated to silence. Four groups of ten infants each (aged 7–11 months) were tested in the conditioned headturn procedure for discrimination of the test syllables. Each group was tested on one of four contrasts (/i/–/e/, /e/–/I/, /E/–/I...
Asymmetries in vowel perception occur such that discrimination of a vowel change presented in one... more Asymmetries in vowel perception occur such that discrimination of a vowel change presented in one direction is easier compared to the same change presented in the reverse direction. Although such effects have been repeatedly reported in the literature there has been little effort to explain when or why they occur. We review studies that report asymmetries in vowel perception in infants and propose that these data indicate that babies are predisposed to respond differently to vowels that occupy different positions in the articulatory/acoustic vowel space (defined by F1-F2) such that the more peripheral vowel within a contrast serves as a reference or perceptual anchor. As such, these asymmetries reveal a language-universal perceptual bias that infants bring to the task of vowel discrimination. We present some new data that support our peripherality hypothesis and then compare the data on asymmetries in human infants with findings obtained with birds and cats. This comparison suggests that asymmetries evident in humans are unlikely to reflect general auditory mechanisms. Several important directions for further research are outlined and some potential implications of these asymmetries for understanding speech development are discussed.
Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is ... more Word segmentation skills emerge during infancy, but it is unclear to what extent this ability is shaped by experience listening to a specific language or language type. This issue was explored by comparing segmentation of bi-syllabic words in monolingual and bilingual 7.5-month-old learners of French and English. In a native-language condition, monolingual infants segmented bi-syllabic words with the predominant stress pattern of their native language. Monolingual French infants also segmented in a different dialect of French, whereas both monolingual groups failed in a cross-language test, i.e. English infants failed to segment in French and vice versa. These findings support the hypothesis that word segmentation is shaped by infant sensitivity to the rhythmic structure of their native language. Our finding that bilingual infants segment bi-syllabic words in two native languages at the same age as their monolingual peers shows that dual language exposure does not delay the emergenc...
Formant frequency convergence (or “focalization”) and linguistic experience interact to shape the... more Formant frequency convergence (or “focalization”) and linguistic experience interact to shape the perception of vowels in adulthood. Here, we provide evidence of the effects of formant proximities and language experience at subcortical levels of the auditory pathway. Using a passive oddball/reversed oddball paradigm, the frequency-following response (FFR) in the auditory brainstem was elicited in sixteen healthy monolingual English speakers by a less-focal/English prototypic /u/ and a more-focal/French prototypic /u/. We examined the FFR as a function of stimulus type (English vs. French prototype) and condition (Standard vs. Deviant). A cross-correlation analysis revealed higher overall similarity between the FFR and evoking stimulus for the English prototype than the French prototype, suggesting an effect of language experience. Yet, deviants exhibited higher correlational values than standards. This effect was largely driven by the French prototype, suggesting an influence of foc...
Behavioral studies examining vowel perception in infancy indicate that, for many vowel contrasts,... more Behavioral studies examining vowel perception in infancy indicate that, for many vowel contrasts, the ease of discrimination changes depending on the order of stimulus presentation, regardless of the language from which the contrast is drawn and the ambient language that infants have experienced. By adulthood, linguistic experience has altered vowel perception; analogous asymmetries are observed for non−native contrasts but are mitigated for native contrasts. Although these directional effects are well documented behaviorally, the brain mechanisms underlying them are poorly understood. In the present study we begin to address this gap. We first review recent behavioral work which shows that vowel perception asymmetries derive from phonetic encoding strategies, rather than general auditory processes. Two existing theoretical models–the Natural Referent Vowel framework and the Native Language Magnet model–are invoked as a means of interpreting these findings. Then we present the resul...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018
Directional asymmetries in vowel discrimination studies reveal that speech perceivers (both adult... more Directional asymmetries in vowel discrimination studies reveal that speech perceivers (both adult and infant) are biased toward extreme vocalic articulations, which lead to acoustic vowel signals with well-defined spectral prominences due to formant convergence. These directional effects occur with vowel stimuli presented in either the acoustic or the visual modality and are independent of specific linguistic experience. Current research is focused on elucidating the perceptual processes underlying this universal vowel bias. In the present investigation, the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) in AX discrimination tasks for unimodal acoustic and visual vowels was manipulated (500 ms vs. 1000 ms) in order to examine whether asymmetries are present under experimental conditions that reduce demands on attention and working memory. Subjects discriminated either video-only or audio-only tokens of naturally-spoken English [u] and French [u] which differ in their degree of visible lip-rounding and proximity between F1...
Mother-infant synchrony has been observed very early in the development in the form of coordinate... more Mother-infant synchrony has been observed very early in the development in the form of coordinated biological rhythms, body movements, gaze orientation, facial expression, emotional
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Papers by Linda Polka