Lectures

This lecture introduces three quantitative methods for studying children's language development across diverse cultural groups: observation, surveys, and experimentation. For each method, we will briefly cover (a) how and when it is typically used to study language development, (b) its associated strengths and weaknesses, and (c) practical considerations for using the method in small-scale, under-documented, remote, or poorly funded research contexts. Special attention will be paid to ethical considerations, as well as integrations with qualitative research. Students will be asked to consider how they imagine applying these methods to the communities they want to study, and to generate a list of "next steps" required to pursue that research.

Developmental psychology and our current understanding of the mechanisms underpinning language development is built on a long history of experimental, corpus and observational studies. This body of work has described what children do, when, and how this differs across cultures, and has led to the development of sometimes competing theories about the cognitive architectures and processes that govern early language development.

More recently, cognitive (computational) modelling has provided additional insight. In this lecture I will argue that both cognitive modelling and experimental studies must go hand-in-hand for theory development. In particular, modelling efforts require a commitment to explicit theory implementation, and each model brings with it its own assumptions about mechanism. However, a model on its own does not tell us anything definitive; rather, models should be used to make predictions that can then be tested empirically. Should these predictions be borne out, we can strengthen our argument that the mechanisms in the model may reflect something about the cognitive mechanisms at play in early development.

The lecture will not assume in-depth knowledge of computational modelling, but will give a broad overview of the approach. I will give examples of this interplay between models and empirical work, and demonstrate how computational work can inform principled experimental investigations that address important theoretical debates in the field.

When do infants start acquiring the sound patterns of the words in their native language(s)? How specific are the early representations of word forms? Are these acquisitions modulated by the language(s) being acquired? And what factors contribute to these acquisitions? This lecture will present research exploring word form recognition in the first year of life, in infants learning different languages (including French, English, Cantonese and Akan), in Europe, Asia or Africa, growing up in monolingual, bilingual or multilingual environments, and being born at term or prematurely. It will highlight similarities and differences across the different results, and discuss challenges and potential solutions in conducting crosslinguistic research.

The mechanisms that enable children to acquire any human language remain one of the central puzzles of language acquisition research and are fundamental to broader questions about the nature and evolution of language. In this talk, I examine the role of linguistic input in language acquisition, focusing on how child-directed speech, adult-directed speech, and peer speech can contribute to children's learning. Drawing on evidence from a typologically and culturally diverse set of languages, I show how cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons provide new insights into the relationship between language input and acquisition. I also introduce a practical framework for conducting cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research, demonstrating how to design studies that maximize linguistic and cultural diversity while maintaining comparability across populations. I argue that theories of language acquisition can only be as general as the diversity of the languages and cultures on which they are built.

Human language is inherently multimodal. Yet, theories of language development have traditionally focused almost exclusively on speech. In this lecture, I argue that integrating evidence from gesture and sign language fundamentally changes how we understand children's first language development. Drawing on research across spoken and signed languages, I will show how children exploit the affordances of different modalities to build linguistic knowledge, communicate meanings that speech alone cannot yet express, and acquire complex linguistic structures. Together, these findings suggest that language development is best understood within a multimodal framework that captures both the universal and modality-specific aspects of human language.

I will provide an overview of why it’s important to study atypical populations, as well as some key methodological issues. We’ll discuss strategies for preparing to conduct a research study with an atypical population, including understanding participant characteristics, techniques for assessing participant profiles, and creating tasks that tap into participants’ abilities. We will discuss the role of intersectionality (e.g., multilingualism and disability) and how it may impact your research. We will also consider larger frameworks in which to situate your research questions, including explanatory theoretical approaches and ethical frameworks (e.g., strengths-based approaches).

In this session, we will consider how best to create culturally appropriate tools for assessing the language skills of child speakers of under-resourced languages. Where does one start if no assessment tools are available? Which words and structures should be included, and who can help one decide in the absence of child language corpora or word-frequency lists? How can one respectfully collect child language data from adult respondents with low literacy levels? What kinds of pictures (if any) should be used during direct assessment? We will not be able to cover all (or even most) aspects of creating culturally and linguistically appropriate tools, but we will work through some core considerations and discuss how to avoid some obvious pitfalls.

Humans refer to things, people, events and other referrables using multimodal communication each day every day during their interactions. The communicative task of referring appears straightforward, but it often is not and may be developmentally challenging to develop. Referential communication is an area where pragmatic knowledge, social cognition, multimodal and interactive communication come together in human development. I will present a few experimental and semi-naturalistic studies that were carried out by our Language and Communication Development (LCD) Lab in Istanbul with preschoolers and infants. 

Heritage speakers are bilinguals who learn their minority, heritage language, under reduced input conditions and in the context of a more dominant, societal language. In this lecture, I review how studying heritage language development can offer a window into long-standing questions in bilingualism research. I present studies that address the role of input quantity and quality in heritage language development, how overlap of structural properties between the heritage and the societal languages can boost rather than hinder heritage language development in a more positive take on crosslinguistic influence, and explore whether heritage speakers can use morphosyntactic cues predictively to comprehend complex structures in their heritage language.

Early vocabulary development is a remarkable feat – children go from babbling to multi-word phrases in a few short years. In this talk, I will discuss key issues in early lexical development. What does it mean when we say that a child “knows” a word? Is lexical development best captured by children’s understanding vs. production of a word? What do different measures of lexical development, e.g., parent report vs. experimental tasks of real-time processing, reveal about children’s lexical skill? How is lexical development similar and different in children learning one vs. more than one language? What tools do we need and what questions should we ask to best study lexical development in the many different contexts represented across the world?