• PhD, Pennsylvania State University
  

In my research, I seek to understand how learners process the incredibly variable input they receive. In the case of language learning, learners encounter input that varies along many dimensions. For example, words in the real world sound different every time they are produced, even when spoken by a single talker, and variability increases exponentially between different talkers. Further, linguistic input can vary when learners encounter different dialects or languages. My research program explores how the process and outcome of learning are shaped by inevitable variability in linguistic experience. 

I investigate these questions in developmental populations (infants and young children) as well as adults, using both experimental techniques (looking time paradigms, eye tracking) and corpus methods. Ongoing and future projects will continue to investigate how infants process talker and accent variability during the early stages of word learning, and whether language background (monolingually or bilingually raised) or experience with different speakers (e.g. other children, accented speakers) influences how learning occurs. Current projects in the lab focus on how infants process speech from older children (e.g. their siblings!), how toddlers and adults process speech in noisy environments, and whether preschoolers and adults choose to learn words from multiple talkers and how that influences their learning.

• Bulgarelli, F. (2026). Going beyond adult speech: Why language development research should consider speech from children. Child Development Perspectives, aadaf004. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdpers/aadaf004
• Samimifar, M., Bulgarelli, F. (2026). Decoding child speech in silence and noise: The type of background noise shapes adults’ processing. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 88(1), 30. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-025-03194-4
• Kalenkovich, E., Koorathota, S., Tor, S., Amatuni, A., Egan-Dailey, S., Moore, C., Laing, M., Garrison, H., Baudet, G., Bulgarelli, F., Uner, S., Righter, L., Bergelson, E., (2025). A year of nouns from English-learning infants’ daily lives: the SEEDLingS-Nouns dataset. Behavior Research Methods 57(11), 298. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02826-9
• Bulgarelli, F., Barry, S., Bergelson, E. (2024). Attending to talker characteristics: Word learning and recognition in monolingually- and multilingually-raised infants. Cognitive Development, 72, 101508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101508
• Bulgarelli, F., Bergelson, E. (2024). Linking acoustic variability in the infants' input to their early word production. Developmental Science, 27(6), e13545. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13545
• Bulgarelli, F., Potter, C.E. (2024). Stability and change in young children’s linguistic experience during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Multilingua, 43(2), 191-212. doi.org/10.1515/multi-2023-0003
• Bulgarelli, F., Bergelson, E. (2023). Talker variability is not always the right noise. 14-month-olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under talker variability conditions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 227, 105575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105575
• Bulgarelli, F., Bergelson, E., (2022). Talker variability shapes early word representations in 8-month-olds. Infancy, 27(2), 341-368. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12452
• Bulgarelli, F., Mielke, J., Bergelson, E., (2021). Quantifying talker variability in North-American infants’ daily input. Cognitive Science, 46(1), e13075 https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13075
• Bulgarelli, F., Weiss, D. J. (2021). Desirable difficulties in statistical learning? How talker variability impacts artificial grammar learning. Language Learning, 71(4), 1085-1121. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12464
• Benitez, V. L., Bulgarelli, F., Byers‐Heinlein, K., Saffran, J. R., & Weiss, D. J. (2020). Statistical learning of multiple speech streams: A challenge for monolingual infants. Developmental Science, 23(2), e12896. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12896
• Cristia, A., Bulgarelli, F., & Bergelson, E. (2020). Accuracy of the language environment analysis system segmentation and metrics: A systematic review. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63(4), 1093-1105. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00017
• Bulgarelli, F., & Bergelson, E. (2019). Look who’s talking: A comparison of automated and human-generated speaker tags in naturalistic day-long recordings. Behavior Research Methods, 52(2), 641-653. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01265-7

• Rising Star, Association for Psychological Sciences
• UB Exceptional Scholar—Young Investigator Award