Language Learning Lab - Current Studies

Current Studies

Parent-Child Joint Behaviors and Language Development with Spanish-English Bilinguals

Our study examines the dynamic interaction between social and linguistic input during play tasks with bilingual caregivers and infants (8-20 months). In this study, we present a series of toys with bilingual labels to the caregivers to play with their infants. From this interactions we analyze parent's speech and use of code-switching while directing their speech to their infant. In addition, we are interesting in examining coordinated behaviors that are contingent to language input. We predict that bilingual parents may be providing more behavioral cues to their infants when code-switching to support their bilingual language development.

Parents align their hands and words!

Imagine a parent joyfully playing with their baby on the playground. They point to a toy car using their index finger and raise the pitch of their voice in an engaging manner, saying, “Look, the car toy is here!” Parents mostly use this specific form of communication instinctively. The exaggerated variations in pitch and the attention-gathering hand gestures used by parents contribute to infants’ language development. However, little is known about how parents combine vocal cues and gestures during interactions with babies, and how these combinations support infants’ language development. To understand how parents align their gestures and speech, we recorded parent-child dyads during play sessions. We ask parents to label 12 items for their children within 6-minute sessions. We expect that parents will raise the pitch of their voices while using gestures. Furthermore, we predict that this vocal and gesture combination will provide more substantial support for the vocabulary knowledge of younger ones compared to older children.

Finding Words in Two Languages

One important process in learning a language is to find individual words within a fluent stream of speech. Think about how hard it is to detect individual words in an unfamiliar language. Surprisingly, babies are equipped with learning processes that allow them to break into the speech stream. Our lab and other labs have demonstrated that babies can track of how often syllables occur together in speech. They can then use the information to find individual words because words are usually made up of consistent syllable sequences. Babies can then store those words to learn what they mean. Even more impressive, our lab has found that bilingual babies are good at tracking separate streams of syllables to find words that belong to two separate languages. Bilinguals have experience tracking patterns in two separate languages, even before they can talk, so they are well equipped to make sense of the languages around them!

Playing and Learning

Babies spend a lot of time exploring their words through play. Parents and other caregivers often support this learning by talking about the objects and events that their children are paying attention to. We are studying how parents respond to their babies' actions and attention and how babies respond to their parents' language and actions. There is an intricate dance to play and we believe that discovering the details of this dance will help us understand how babies learn from their parents.

Dynamics of Bilingual Learning

In this new project funded by the National Science Foundation, we are studying how young bilinguals learn two languages. What do bilingual parents do that helps their infants understand and say words in two languages? Most studies of early language development have examined children learning only one language, but millions of children in the U.S. grow up learning two or more languages. This means that the fields of developmental science, linguistics, early education, speech-language pathology, and medicine have an inaccurate view of how children learn to communicate. By examining how bilingual and monolingual parents play with their infants, we will investigate how features of parent-child play relate to children’s language knowledge. The findings from this study will help parents, teachers, speech-language therapists, and doctors support the development of young bilinguals.

We are traveling to families’ homes to record parents while they play with their infants. We are also collecting measures of parents’ and infant’s language knowledge and language use patterns. The project focuses on Mexican heritage families, monolingual and bilingual, because many American bilinguals have Mexican heritage and speak Spanish in addition to English. We will analyze links between parents’ language, their gestures and actions, and how they follow and guide their infants’ attention. We will also analyze how infants respond to and guide parents’ behaviors, in addition to the relations with infants’ emerging vocabulary knowledge. This research will reveal dimensions of parent-infant interactions that occur across monolingual and bilingual Mexican heritage families and features that are specific to bilinguals.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) across contexts

Adults tend to talk to babies very differently than they talk to other adults. This manner of talking has a special name, called infant-directed speech (IDS), and it is characterized by high pitch, slower speech rate, and more repetition, among many other features. We know a lot about what IDS Is and how it is related to language development, age, etc. But we know less about how parents' use of IDS may change based on the specific context. Do parents recognize the attentional, developmental, and linguistic needs of the activity -- or context -- and change the way they speak to their infants based on that information? This project involves analyzing speech that parents produced when completing various activities with their 11-20-month-old infants. We are analyzing how parents adjust their pitch and how they say vowels when talking with their infants during three tasks: book reading, playing, and object sorting. We think that this research will reveal a greater understanding of parents' speech to their children, which can further inform interventions and methods that can play a role in children's healthy language development.

Language experience and cognitive development of deaf children

The language children are exposed to from birth has a reciprocal relationship with other aspects of their cognitive development. For certain populations, such as those who are born deaf, learning a language can be quite complicated. More than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who likely do not know sign language. Thus, many deaf children experience language deprivation and challenges when it comes to communicating with their parents and the hearing world. As a result of this, research has shown that deaf children perform worse than their hearing peers on many cognitive tasks. One of these areas of cognition is pattern learning, AKA statistical learning. We are interested in how language experience affects visual statistical learning abilities in deaf children receiving sign input, spoken English input, and hearing children. We will test this by having children complete a fun and interactive statistical learning task. In collaboration with Dr. David Corina at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis, we will also collect EEG data while children complete the task. This is a non-invasive, painless neuroimaging method that allows us to see children's brain activity. This research will be very important In learning more about the complex language-cognition connection and will inform interventions that can support developmental outcomes of both hearing and deaf children.