Lisa Gustavsson

Lisa Gustavsson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University, where she conducts cutting-edge research on early language acquisition and forensic phonetics. She is affiliated with the Stockholm Babylab, a research group dedicated to studying infant language development through multiple parallel projects and international collaborations.

Her research interests focus on early language acquisition, specifically examining speech processing, speech production, and communicative interaction in infants, with particular attention to the acoustic characteristics of speech signals. She also investigates forensic phonetics, exploring speaker identification and profiling techniques for forensic investigations, and how speaker recognition relates to fundamental phonetic processes. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics with practical applications in understanding how infants acquire language.

Analyzing her recent publications reveals consistent themes in infant language development research. Her work demonstrates a strong focus on how hyperarticulation in child-directed speech affects language learning, the development of tone perception across different language environments, and the role of social and emotional factors in language acquisition. Her research spans multiple methodologies including behavioral experiments, cross-linguistic comparisons, and neuroscientific approaches to understanding speech processing.

Gustavsson leads several significant research projects including Learning First Words (L3WO), which investigates hyperarticulation's effect on infant word recognition; The Effect of Hyperarticulation on Early Language Development (HELD); Distributional Learning: Domain-specificity and the impact of social cues (DIDI); Learning Tones: The influence of pitch accent language experience on lexical tone perception (LETO); Parent Affect in Language Learning (PALL); SoundStart; and the CAPSL-project on statistical learning and auditory predictability.

As part of the Stockholm Babylab, Gustavsson works within a collaborative research environment that employs multimodal approaches to study language acquisition longitudinally through parent-child interactions. Her work contributes significantly to our understanding of the complex processes involved in how infants learn language, with implications for both theoretical linguistics and practical applications in speech therapy and language education.