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Communication Development in Infants: the Case of the Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

Objective

The way children learn to communicate verbally and non-verbally depends to a great extent to the culture in which they are raised. Much is known about the social environment of children living in Western societies, but much less is known about how children are socialized in hunter-gatherer societies. The proposed project aims at gaining insights into the development of communication in hunter-gatherer children. The project’s aims are
• to develop a minimally intrusive assessment method that gives access to the learning process by including physiological measures.
• to analyze physiological responses to infants’ verbal and non-verbal interactions with their social environment focusing on the Hadza, as a particularly interesting cultural community.
• extract patterns in data from diverse sources (audio, video, observation, electrophysiological measures) with automated data mining methods.
The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating methods from anthropology and ethology with modern physiological assessment methods, innovative wearable technology and data mining techniques. It is important to know more about the development of communication in Hadza infants as communication in hunter-gatherers has not been comprehensively studied and the Hadza are a community living in conditions that resemble our ancestors’ living conditions. This helps to shed light on the evolution of language in our species. As hunter-gatherer societies are increasingly threatened due to ecological, economic and political changes in their environment, it is crucial to conduct this research as soon as possible.
My personal training targets are to apply my previous field work experience to a new and interesting cultural community and relate this to theories about the evolution of language, to fruitfully combine methods from different disciplines and learn how to use data mining techniques in order to analyze large amounts of data from various sources.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2014

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Coordinator

TILBURG UNIVERSITY- UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 177 598,80
Address
WARANDELAAN 2
5037 AB Tilburg
Netherlands

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 177 598,80
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