What is wordform recognition? Before they can even consider learning what words mean, infants need to be able to recognize the consistent way that words sound, even though the same word can sound super different each time it’s said! Take a listen to this audio recording of all the times a baby heard other people […]
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Phonology: the study of speech sounds in the mind
What is Phonology? Did you know that you had a set of unconscious rules about how you can arrange sounds in your language? Phonology is a field of study in linguistics that examines the patterns of sounds within a language and across different languages. It aims to study how we, as humans, mentally organize the […]
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Abstract vs. Imageable words: which ones are easier to learn?
Some words are easier to form an image of than others. Think of the word moon: perhaps you think of a pale yellow crescent shape, or an illuminating white circle in front of a smoky blue backdrop. Regardless, the word has a high degree of imageability. Now think of the word truth: what exactly does […]
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Zoom into language development: How does an online study with infants work?
As everything closed during the COVID-19 lockdowns, of course, our lab was no exception. With no safe way of further testing children and parents in our lab facilities, we had to bring the lab to our participants. With online yoga classes and family gatherings, we thought to ourselves: shouldn’t that work for our experiments as […]
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How do we process language as we see or hear it? You can predict the future (a little bit)!
Language Processing Models: Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Bottom-up pathways rely on data as it comes in. These models process information by building up a larger meaning step-by-step from basic units, kind of like climbing up a staircase. For example, if you used a bottom-up method while reading, your eyes would transmit each individual letter to your […]
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Illusions from combining senses: the McGurk Effect!
Are you familiar with the “Yanny or Laurel” debate? If so, which name did you hear? Did what you hear ever change if you were reading one of the names when listening to the sound? If you answered “yes” to the questions above, then you might’ve experienced something called the McGurk Effect! Our experience of […]
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Randomized control trials help scientists know if interventions can influence child development.
Have you ever wondered how researchers determine whether a treatment works as expected? One way to achieve this goal is through intervention research. Simply put, in intervention research, scientists and medical practitioners give a new treatment (or intervention) to a group of people and measure if the outcome is different from a group who didn’t […]
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Kids tend to slice up the world into whole objects while they’re learning word meanings.
Scientists think that children have a “toolkit” that helps them make a guess about a new word’s meaning. That toolkit has strategies like shape bias and mutual exclusivity. Shape bias means that children are more likely to extend the meaning of a word to new objects that have similar shapes than they are to objects that […]
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How do we measure young children’s vocabulary size?
When studying early childhood language, researchers often want to know children’s vocabulary size, but it can be difficult for researchers to get a truly accurate idea of what children words children know. We can’t tell what’s in their usual vocabulary just from interacting with them during a research visit, since we are only around them […]
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One way to research children’s development is through elicitation tasks.
Elicitation tasks are a category of research methods that refers to any technique aiming to bring out responses from people. It allows researchers to gain insights into what participants think and know. This method is used in a wide range of disciplines, from cognitive science to behavioral economics. Common elicitation tasks include questionnaires, interviews, and brainstorming […]