Description:

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.