Dr. Meg Cychosz
Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles
Topic: Harnessing children’s messy, naturalistic environments to understand speech development
Abstract:
Children learn the patterns of their native language(s) from years spent interacting and observing in their everyday environments. How can we model these daily experiences at a large scale? It is no longer a question of if sufficiently comprehensive datasets can be constructed, but rather how to harness these messy, naturalistic observations of how children and their caregivers communicate.
In this talk, I will present recent work that used child-centered audio recorders to illustrate how children’s everyday language learning environments shape their speech development. I will present work that I conducted with colleagues on the language learning environments of bilingual Quechua-Spanish children in Bolivia, infants and toddlers who are deaf and have received cochlear implants, and work with a new, massive dataset consisting of infant speech samples from a large number of typologically-diverse languages. Although these populations seem disparate, I will show how studying the everyday language environments of infants and children from a variety of backgrounds (large cross-cultural samples, children with hearing loss) helps us better understand universals and language-specific trajectories in early speech development.
Talant Abdykairov
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