No Images? Click here Child Language Lab Newsletter- November 2017
The Many Babies Project Infant researchers across the world are collaborating in the largest infant study ever conducted: the "ManyBabies" project. Macquarie University's Child Language Lab has decided to take part in this project. Labs in the "ManyBabies" project all conduct the exact same experiment, which tests whether infants prefer listening to infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech. We totally expect that infants will prefer the infant-directed speech, as it has been shown time and again that they do. So what is new and exciting about this study? This is the first time that labs across the world conduct the exact same infant study, and therefore the first time that we can test whether infants across the world behave the same in infant experiments! Are the babies in Australia more "laid back" in experiments? This is our chance to find out! Dr. Titia Benders and PACE student Joanna Allen are in the final stages of setting up the study. Once our set-up has been video-recorded and approved by the team, we will start contacting parents in our database to see if they are interested in participating. We shall be recruiting infants aged between 12-15 months. Stay tuned for recruitment announcements on our Facebook page and website! New Members Meet our PACE students The Child Language Lab has welcomed four undergraduate students who are part of the University's PACE program. PACE (Professional and Community Engagement) is a University initiative which provides undergraduate students with real-world learning experience. Our PACE students have assisted the lab with running studies, contacting potential participants, coding data, cataloging equipment and piloting studies. Here is what the students have said about their experience with PACE: "This placement has been a great starting point to various fields of research in the speech, hearing and language sciences area". -Safa Ebrahimi "It gave me experience with adhering to research ethics guidelines and the processes involved in getting the research ready for participants". -Joanna Allen This experience provided by the University has allowed these students to use new equipment and software whilst also gaining insight on how to undertake language related research. Many thanks to Khristine Fernando, Joanna Allen, Emma Jackson, Safa Ebrahimi and Jia-Ning Goh for helping out with various Child Language Lab duties! We wish you all the best with your future studies and careers! Recent Events Congratulations to our second lucky prize draw winner! Congratulations to Rachel Wang and her parents on winning our lucky prize draw of $150 coles/Myer gift vouchers! Rachel who attends Gordan Community Preschool, automatically went into the draw to win this prize after taking part in our iPad study. We are thrilled to share this exciting news with one of the many parents who agreed to have their child take part in our research study which explores how children acquire an understanding of plurals. We thank them and also the following daycares and preschools: Kids Academy, Just For Kids (Pennant Hills), Peter Rabbit Community Preschool, Gordan Community Preschool, Sandcastles (Chatswood), Earth kids Early Learning Centre, Beecroft Buddies Childcare Centre, Birdhouse Early Learning Centre, Appleseed Childcare, CCA Family Daycare, Maroubra Early Learning Centre, Head Start Early Learning (Roseville), Maroubra Neighbourhood Children's Centre, Mt Sinai College Early Learning Centre, Mt Sinai College-Prep School, Janes Place Early Learning Centre, Little Learning School (Maroubra) and Explore and Develop (Waitara). We have had so much fun working with these centres and we really appreciate their continuous support and notable contributions to the field of child language acquisition! Essential Baby and Toddler Expo: September 2017, ICC Sydney Once again, we would like to thank all of our Child Language Lab friends and families who visited us at this year's Expo at the International Convention Centre. The Lab had an incredible time meeting new families and engaging in conversations with them about how children learn language. This time round, our Lab hosted a stall with MARCS Baby Lab from Western Sydney University. Together, we presented our latest work on infant research and also recruited our future participants, who will be invited for various studies at the lab. If you missed out on this year's expo, visit or facebook page or website, mq.edu.au/childlanglab to take part in our current studies and to learn about our research in child language acquisition. Brilliant Brains: How Kids Learn Language, August 2017, Powerhouse Museum For the very first time, the Child Language Lab hosted an event as part of the Sydney Science Festival during National Science Week. Lab director, Prof. Katherine Demuth kicked off the event by presenting a talk about how children learn language. After the talk, Lab members hosted a range of research related activities including interactive demonstrations and games about recent research highlights regarding how children acquire sounds, words and grammar in their first and second language. The event was a great success and the perfect opportunity for many parents and children to unravel the mysteries of language learning and to also sign up for our future studies! A big thank you to lab member, Carmen Kung for organizing this event, we appreciate the time and effort put into this! Macquarie University students visit the Northern Territory Prof. Katherine Demuth and A/Prof. Mridula Sharma have been involved in an on-going Indigenous language project investigating the “Relationship between Indigenous Children's Ear Health and Phonological Awareness”. The project is in collaboration with Prof. Gillian Wigglesworth at the University of Melbourne. In August, researchers from both institutions along with five Masters of Clinical Audiology students along with Audiology Clinical Educator Mr Oskars Stubis traveled the Northern Territory for fieldwork and tested over 50 children aged 5-11years in the local school over 5 days. Conference Reports International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech: September 2017, Chania, Greece Prof. Katherine Demuth was invited as a Plenary Speaker at the recent International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2017 (ISMBS 2017) in Chania, Crete. Her talk highlighted much of the Child Language Lab’s current research on preschoolers’ bilingual language development, much of it in collaboration with postdoc Dr. Nan Xu Rattanasone. The conference was unique in bringing together researchers working on child bilingualism, adult L2 language learning, and clinicians, with several new collaborative research connections forged. International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL): July 2017, Lyon, France Child Language Lab members Prof. Katherine Demuth, Dr. Titia Benders, Carmen Kung and Dr. Thembi Dube attended the IASCL conference hosted in Lyon, France. Prof. Katherine Demuth’s symposium “Language development by children wearing cochlear implants” brought together researchers from both Australia and the US to discuss issues of both parental input and later language processing abilities by children with cochlear implants, noting the various developmental challenges. Dr. Titia Benders, together with close colleague Dr. Tineke Snijders from The Netherlands, organized a symposium entitled "Song and Prosody for Early Language Acquisition". Parents and speech therapists often observe that songs seem to help children learn language. However, there is hardly any research about the potential contribution of songs to language learning. In this symposium, Titia and Tineke presented their brain-imaging research, which revealed that infants can learn words from songs. Carmen Kung's symposium entitled "Methodological considerations for studying on-line sentence processing in children using event-related potentials" brought on discussions about what the critical issues are in designing, conducting, and analysing data from studies which use event-related potentials to study sentence processing in children. IASCL is a special event which brings together a series of symposiums and poster sessions presented by Child Language researchers from across the world. |