No Images? Click here Child Language Lab Newsletter- June 2017
Current Study: Recruiting Now We are still looking for 9-11-year-olds who speak Mandarin at home and Australian English as their second language! Ever wondered whether bilingual brains process language just like those of native speakers of English? We invite you and your child to help answer this question by participating in our study in the Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University. The task will take approximately 2.5 hours. You will receive a $50 Coles/Myer gift card and get your transportation costs refunded! We also offer free parking. To find out more, please contact Thembi on (02) 9850 2937 or Carmen on (02) 9850 6765. Email us on ling.cll@mq.edu.au to participate today! Research Highlights Ping Tang takes our research to Beijing Language and Culture University in China PhD student Ping Tang just returned from Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), where he spent two months conducting a study on how Mandarin-speaking children acquire words and tone. In collaboration with Prof. Liqun Gao from BLCU, Ping tested more than 100 children aged 3-6 years in a kindergarten located on BLCU campus. The data collected on this trip will provide a better understanding of how Mandarin children acquire the tonal system. The data will also be used as a baseline for future studies on the acquisition of Mandarin tone in children with cochlear implants who often have difficulties with tone perception. How 4-year-olds produce subtle but important sound differences PhD student Julien Millasseau recently completed a study which investigated the production of "voicing contrasts" by 4-year-old children who were monolingual speakers of Australian English. Voicing is how we differentiate between some pairs of sounds. For example, the words ‘peach’ and ‘beach’ only differ in the voicing of the first sound in these words. To assess whether children can produce these contrasts to the same extent as adults, Julien recorded the speech of twenty 4-year-olds and 10 adults who repeated sentences played on an iPad. The results showed that 4-year-olds already produce voicing contrast in an adult-like way! This study is the first to assess Australian-English-speaking children’s production of these subtle but important sound differences, and gives new insight in when children begin to use language in an adult-like way. It also provides a much-needed baseline for exploring the acquisition of the voicing contrasts in other populations known to have difficulties producing voicing contrasts, such as second-language learners and children with hearing loss. Does changing the speaker change how we process grammar? PhD student Rebecca Holt completed her MRes study in 2016 which investigated whether listeners take a speaker’s foreign accent into account when processing grammatical information. Bec measured listeners’ brain responses to sentences with two different types of grammatical errors: errors of omission (e.g. The father carefully cook) and errors of commission (e.g. The fathers carefully cooks). Half were produced by a native speaker of Australian English, the others by a Mandarin-accented speaker. Listeners' brains responded differently to errors of commission produced by the Australian-English-accented speaker than by Mandarin-accented speaker. This shows that listeners consider the accent of the speaker when they process grammatical information. Surprisingly, listeners did not respond to the errors of omission produced by either speaker, probably because listeners were only processing the sentences superficially. Conference Reports And Recent Events The relationship of Indigenous children's ear health to phonological awareness in remote communities: March 2017, Macquarie University Many of the current interventions which address conductive hearing loss in Aboriginal children living remotely focus on sound amplification. While this is important, a better understanding of the influence of a child's native language and auditory listening skills is also critical for improving children's language and literacy outcomes. This workshop outlined research which will explore the relationship between children's phonological awareness and hearing/listening status from communities in East and West Arnhem Land and Central Australia. It aims to describe 6-8-year-olds' levels of hearing loss, auditory processing, phonological awareness and other risk factors (for language acquisition and literacy) across communities. The findings will provide evidence-based advice for teachers and parents to enhance the language and literacy skills of Aboriginal children. It is hoped that the results will be used as a translational guide for the iHearing Program (NT Department of Health), facilitating the development of more appropriate resources and programs to enhance Aboriginal children's learning of English as a second language. The event was sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University's Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS), Distinguished Prof. Katherine Demuth's ARC Laureate Fellowship and the University of Melbourne. It is part of a joint project between Macquarie University (Distinguished Prof. Katherine Demuth, Associate Prof. Mridula Sharma) and the University of Melbourne (Prof. Gillian Wigglesworth, Dr. Anna Stephen) which will explore the relationship of Indigenous children's ear health to phonological awareness in remote communities. The Developing Lexicon Workshop: April 2017, Macquarie University The Child Language Lab hosted local, national, and international guests for the 2-day workshop "The Developing Lexicon: Representations and Processes". The "lexicon" is our mental dictionary of words, and the workshop presenters spoke about their research into its development. A topic of interest was the bilingual lexicon, with research revealing that representations from one language influence word recognition in the other language. International guests were Prof. Bob McMurray (University of Iowa, USA), who discussed children may not yet recognize words as easily and quickly as adults; Prof. Paul Boersma (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), who discussed deep learning computer simulations of the lexicon; and Prof. Paula Fikkert (Radboud University, The Netherlands), who spoke about the surprising phenomenon that infants and toddlers notice a change from "p" to "t", but not vice versa! The workshop was sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), the Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) and the ARC Laureate Fellowship held by Distinguished Prof. Katherine Demuth. HEARing CRC Research Symposium: May 2017, Melbourne Distinguished Prof. Katherine Demuth and Dr. Nan Xu Rattanasone from the Child Language Lab attended a 2-day symposium hosted by The HEARing Cooperative Research Centre (Hearing CRC) at the University of Melbourne. The HEARing CRC is a collaboration of 21 internationally-recognised research organisations that aims to lay the foundation for a new era of hearing healthcare for Australia. At the meeting, Nan presented work from Ben Davies’ PhD thesis on grammatical development among children with hearing loss. The talk received lots of interest, especially on using the iPad as a fun and interactive testing tool. This study will provide the basis for larger scale studies on examining the language abilities of children with hearing loss. The meeting also provided many opportunities to hear about cutting edge work from other collaborators. This work includes new methods on testing and training children’s pitch perception especially relevant for tone language speakers (including large population of Chinese-speakers around the world); new materials for cochlear implants that will allow for better fitting and hence better outcomes, and various digital testing and intervention tools for telepractice delivered over the internet to reach more children. CCD High School Work Experience Program: May 2017 Last month the CCD hosted its annual High School Work Experience Program, which provided a range of research training activities for students in years 10,11 and 12. The program gave students insight in what it’s like to undertake research in linguistics, cognitive science and speech pathology. As part of the program, Child Language Lab post-docs Dr. Nan Xu Rattanasone and Dr. Ivan Yuen conducted two training sessions, showing students how eye-tracking and ultrasound methods are used to collect speech perception and production data. Students were able to experience first-hand some of the linguistic research that we conduct at the Child Language Lab. |