Recent International Projects and Presentations

Adrianne Simpson, a recent graduate of our laboratory, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to study the relation between home literacy activities and early language acquisition in French-speaking families in Geneva. Adrianne presented her research at the International Association for Child Language in Edinburgh, Scotland in Summer 2008.

Dr. Pascal Zesiger and his students have implemented a French language version of the CCT to study language acquisition in infants in Geneva, Switzerland. Their findings were presented at the meeting of the Committee of Speech and Language Therapists and Logopedists in Ljubljana, Slovenia in Spring 2009.

Dr. Diane Poulin-Dubois has recently implemented the French and English CCT with a bilingual population in Montreal, Canada.

Margaret Friend and Amy Pace presented a paper on children’s understanding of human actions and the verbs that name them at the meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Budapest, Hungary in August 2009 and are presenting new data on this topic at the Language Culture and Mind Conference in Turku, Finland in June 2010.

Current Studies

Verb Learning in Action

How do young children interpret dynamic human action? How are children’s perceptions of events in the physical world related to how they learn words to describe those events? There is a general consensus that learning verbs is more challenging than learning nouns for young children. The ability to notice the distinct actions that make up everyday events provides the foundation for a child to learn names for these actions. In our laboratory, one focus is on how toddlers break up events and how this is related to verb learning. We are using several paradigms to study this language development in toddlers.

Behavior Re-enactment: In this paradigm, toddlers watch one of our lab members perform a sequence of actions. The child’s imitation of these actions helps us to understand how they organize events and how they learn words to describe them.

Preferential Looking: In this paradigm, children watch several short videos of sequence of actions. The timing of the actions allows us to learn, from children's visual attention, what their expectations are about the organization of human action.

Event-Related Potentials: In this paradigm, electrical activity at the scalp is recorded as toddlers watch a sequence of actions. These responses help us understand how visual motion is processed by the brain. The differences recorded in electrical activity may help us to identify basic processes that are involved in verb learning.

The purpose of these studies is to understand the way that a variety of experiences contribute to verb learning. Research from each of these approaches will contribute to our understanding of these processes. Participation in any of these ongoing studies is welcome.

The Home Literacy Environment

Language develops quite rapidly in late infancy and toddlerhood. Our research is based on the expectation that children's interactions with parents, siblings, and significant others, are a primary source of language exposure. We are interested in the relationship between language development and the activities that are a part of children's daily life. We are using several paradigms to discover the impact that these experiences have on the development of both language and early literacy in late infancy through the preschool years.

Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT): The CCT was developed to directly assess infant language comprehension. The design of the task helps to maintain infant interest and attention resulting in a reliable measure of their early language understanding.  

Parent Reports: Parents report their child’s language comprehension and production through a series of checklists in the MacArthur Child Development Inventory. Parent reports provide us with insights on how their child’s language development is progressing.

Laboratory Observation: We use several observational approaches to understand how parent-child interactions support early language development. Together, observations and parent reports provide us with a comprehensive view on the language environment occupied by the child and its relation to language and literacy development.