SCSB Lunch Series with Dr. Marvin Lavechin: Small babies, big data: decoding early vocalizations with speech technology
November 14 | 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/98894785862]
Speaker: Marvin Lavechin, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Psycholinguistics Lab, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Talk title: Small babies, big data: decoding early vocalizations with speech technology
Abstract: Babbling is a critical milestone during which infants explore moving their articulators to produce increasingly complex sounds before producing their first words around 12 months. As of today, studying vocal development requires the costly and labor-intensive process of manually transcribing children’s linguistic productions, which often limits research to small sample sizes. In this talk, I’ll present my ongoing efforts to build a fully automated speech processing pipeline to enable large-scale studies of vocal development from naturalistic day-long recordings. The talk follows three stages of inquiry. First, detecting when children vocalize – a prerequisite for studying what they say (past work). Second, characterizing the sounds they produce (current work). Third, measuring when language-specificity emerges in their vocalizations (future work). With this pipeline, I hope to address two long-standing questions: To what extent do individuals follow shared trajectories in phonological development? And when do infants start exhibiting distinct babbling patterns across different languages? Beyond theoretical implications, these insights will also allow investigation of early vocal markers associated with atypical language development.