• 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., Bergelson, E. (in press). Linking acoustic variability in the infants' input to their early word production. Developmental Science.
• Bulgarelli, F. (2024). Connecting environmental and genetic explanations for nonlinear language development in infancy and toddlerhood. Biological Psychiatry.  
• 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
• 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
• Bulgarelli, F., & Bergelson, E., (2022). Talker variability shapes early word representations in 8-month-olds. Infancy, 27(2), 341-368.
• Bulgarelli, F., Mielke, J., & Bergelson, E. (2021). Quantifying talker variability in North-American infants’ daily input. Cognitive Science, 46(1), e13075
• Bulgarelli, F., & Weiss, D. J. (2021). Desirable difficulties in statistical learning? How talker variability impacts artificial grammar learning. Language Learning, 71(4), 1085-1121.
• Bulgarelli, F., Weiss, D. J., & Dennis, N. A. (2020). Cross-situational statistical learning in younger and older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 28(3), 346-366.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Bulgarelli, F., & Weiss, D. J. (2016). Anchors aweigh: The impact of overlearning on entrenchment effects in statistical learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(10), 1621.