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 […]
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Can babies learn more than one language from birth? Yes, no problem!
Multilingualism in childhood: Developing the ability to communicate proficiently in more than one language Multilingual children regularly hear more than one language and develop multiple systems of communication to engage with and learn about the world around them. These kids take a little bit longer than monolingual children to become proficient since they are building […]
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What’s the difference between sign languages and verbal languages? Their modality!
Both sign language and verbal (also referred to as spoken) language are full forms of language (full stop!). They just use different forms of physical expression, known as modalities. Verbal language involves the oral-auditory modality, which is based on the sounds that humans can produce with their vocal tracts and understand with their hearing. Sign […]
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Words sometimes sound the same but mean different things, or mean the same thing but sound different! Homonymy, Synonymy, and Polysemy
Language can be ambiguous and confusing, even for adults. For example, sometimes two words that sound the same mean something very different, and sometimes words that sound very different have very closely related meanings! Homonymy, polysemy, and synonymy are just a few properties of language where the meanings and sounds of words interact. Let’s break […]