No Images? Click here Child Language Lab Newsletter - October 2018Greetings from the Child Language Lab We have had a busy few months with some wonderful events, including Ben Davies' PhD graduation, lab PhD students competing in the 3-Minute-Thesis competition, a fieldtrip to the Northern Territory, a Child Bilingual Development workshop, Sydney Science festival events at the Powerhouse Museum and a number of conferences! You can read more about all of these in this edition of the newsletter. Lab members have also been busy publishing papers (and you see all of them on our new website), submitting proposals to conferences (we will have lots to report on in the next edition) and PhD Ping Tang is due to submit his thesis very soon. We continue to be incredibly thankful to all the children and their parents who have been willing to be involved in our studies. Their participation allows our researchers to learn more about the nature of language development in children in order to inform more targeted language therapies and provide an evidence base for health and education policy. Opportunities to participate in current studies are listed below and we would really appreciate it if you could let others know who might be interested. For up-to-date information on what is happening at the Child Language Lab, you can like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter or email us. We look forward to staying in touch. With best wishes, Professor Katherine Demuth, Lab Director, ARC Laureate Fellow Call for participants: All studies available Speech Production 4-5-year-olds with a hearing impairment who have parents who speak Australian English at home. Email Juilien Millasseau to express your interest or ask questions. Audio-visual sentence processing 7-11-year-olds with either hearing aids or cochlear implants who have parents who speak Australian English at home. Email Bec Holt to express your interest or ask questions. Speech Rhythm 13-year-olds who speak only Australian English at home. Email Kyoji Iwamoto to express your interest or ask questions. MARCS Baby Lab Early listening skills 4.5-6-year-olds with parents who can complete a 10-minute online survey. Call for participants: Featured study We are looking for English-speaking 4-5 and 7-12 year-olds with hearing loss How do children with hearing loss process speech and language? Researchers at the Child Language are currently investigating this question. The results of these studies will help children with hearing loss by supporting health professions to improve interventions for them. We are now recruiting to 4-5 year-olds and 7-12 year-olds:
The task which will be conducted at the Australian Hearing Hub will take approximately 20-30 mins to complete. You and your child will receive a Coles/Myer gift card for taking part in the study. For more information, please email Julien (4-5-year-olds) or Bec (7-12-year-olds). New Masters of Research student: Elise Tobin Elise is a new member of the lab and is currently undertaking her Masters of Research in Linguistics, investigating the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech produced by Australian English-speaking fathers. She will be seeking to recruit fathers and their infants (aged 6-12 months) very soon. So please email us if you would like to know more, or know fathers who might be interested. Elise's current research is concerned with the linguistic and emotional features of infant-directed speech. Other research interests include the perception and production of affective speech, and the role of prosody in communication. Congratulations to Dr Ben Davies on his PhD graduation Congratulations to Ben Davies who graduated with his PhD on 25 September! His thesis was titled 'Children’s Gradual Acquisition of Singular and Plural'. His supervisors Katherine Demuth and Nan Xu were very proud and Nan was thrilled to have her first PhD student graduate! Congratulations to Julien & Bec for 3 Minute Thesis awards Congratulations to Julien Millasseau and Bec Holt for their great presentations in the 3 Minute Thesis Competitions. Bec won first prize and people's choice award in the Department of Linguistics round, and Julien second in the Faculty-wide round, meaning he progressed to the University-wide round, where he came equal third. Julien explained how his PhD research will help improve the lives of children with hearing loss by identifying challenges to learning spoken language. Bec explained how her research on audio-visual integration for speech perception in children with hearing loss will contribute to more targeted interventions for these children/. Thank you to lab volunteer: Ei-Leen Lim We have really appreciated the work of lab volunteer, Ei-Leen Lim. She has worked with Dr Titia Benders coding journal abstracts, attended lab meetings, and assisted at events including the 'Brilliant Brains' event at the Sydney Science Festival and the Child Bilingual Development workshop. This was Ei-Leen's message to people volunteering in the future (thanks!):
Research Highlights: Indigenous Ear Health and Phonological Awareness Project This year, Lab Director Professor Katherine Demuth along with Associate Professor Mridula Sharma from Macquarie University and the HEARing CRC, and Professor Gillian Wigglesworth from The University of Melbourne continued investigating the relationship between the hearing of Indigenous children and their performance on early literacy skills. Forty-three local school children, aged 5-11 years, were tested to determine their hearing and auditory processing abilities as well as for their understanding of individual sounds in spoken words (phonological awareness), which is an important precursor to literacy. Preliminary results show that 20% of the participating children had impacted middle ears, and most of the younger children had difficulty completing the pre-literacy skill tasks. The team referred those with ear problems for further appraisal. They plan to build on this work to understand the listening challenges of children in remote communities and the potential effects these may have on learning. For more information you can read about their recent fieldwork with Masters of Audiology students and a co-authored article on a program to respond to otitis media in Australian Aboriginal communities. Research Highlights: Kyoji's testing going full-steam ahead! In our last newsletter we introduced you to Kyoji Iwamoto, a visiting PhD student from Japan. Kyoji has settled into the lab really well and has been very busy with his study of language rhythm. We are very grateful to all the parents who have responded to our call for participants and all the wonderful children and teenagers who have been willing to participate! He is still looking for 13-year-olds to participate, so if you know of any who would be interested (and they'll get a $20 Coles/Myer gift voucher), then please email Kyoji. Thank you! Conference report: Child Bilingual Development workshop With over 100 delegates, this international event brought together people from a range of disciplines and backgrounds: linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, speech pathologists, educators and parents of bilingual children. It thus allowed for great networking opportunities and the chance to reflect on a range of bilingual acquisition perspectives. We heard about current research on the factors that enhance or impede bilingual language development, and the implications for theories of language acquisition, education and clinical practice. The keynote addresses (with audio and slides freely available online) included:
Eight other papers and sixteen posters were presented by researchers from around the world, and some of our lab members (see program). All sessions were well-attended with lively question times and great discussions during poster sessions. One attendee commented that the workshop was “a fantastic model” in how to disseminate research to a broad audience. We look forward to continuing collaborations that enable our research to reach diverse audiences and inform educational and clinical practice as well as theory. The workshop was sponsored by the Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth’s ARC Laureate Fellowship (FL130100014) and the Child Language Lab, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD) and the Macquarie University Centre for Language Sciences (CLas).Event report: Brilliant Brains (Sydney Science Festival) Researchers from the Child Language Lab ran four hours of non-stop interactive games and demonstrations at the Powerhouse Museum as part of the Sydney Science Festival’s Big Family Science Day (12 August 2018). Over 200 people pre-registered, several hundred attended on the day, and 75 children were signed-up by their parents to participate in future studies at the Child Language lab. Children and adults alike had great fun learning about recent research on child language acquisition and had opportunities to chat with researchers and ask questions. The different activity stalls included: ‘Being Bilingual’ (guess the language games), ‘Speech gymnastics’ (seeing an ultrasound image of your tongue!), ‘Laurel vs. Yanny’ (a chance to join the debate and learn about the science of why this sound file went viral!), ‘How kids learn words’ (a demonstration using Wug-test-type-card games), ‘Can you predict the future’ (guessing games to learn about language processing) and ‘Looking while listening’ (a chance to try out the mobile eye-tracking machine). One of the organisers wrote in an email:
CLL researchers had a great time explaining their research and answering questions, and they look forward to being part of Big Science Day again next year! A big thank you to Carmen and Isabel who helped coordinate, and all the lab members! Event report: Speed meet a scientist (Sydney Science Festival) One of the lab's Deputy Directors, Titia Benders, participated in ‘Speed meet scientists’ at the Powerhouse Museum special evening sessions for the Sydney Science Festival on 8 August. Thirty-eight scientists talked to almost 400 people about their fields of research and how important science is to society. (Can you spot her talking in the photo to the right?) Event report: Visiting Work Experience Students The Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders hosted another group of twelve Year 10 and 11 work experience students and we welcomed them to the Child Language Lab on 28 August. Ivan had them fascinated by ultrasound images of the tongue showing how it moves when we say different sounds in different languages. And Nan enjoyed convincing the students that by studying children's looking behaviour we can tell that even 2-year-olds can generalize knowledge about plurals to new words! One student commented: “I definitely want to do a science degree now instead of business!” Conference reports: LabPhon16 & IWLP In June, Child Language Lab Director Katherine Demuth and lab members Ivan Yuen, Ping Tang and Michael Proctor (along with Phonetics Lab members) attended the LabPhon conference in Lisbon, Portugal. PhD student Ping Tang presented two posters, postdoc Ivan Yuen presented a paper and Lab Director Katherine Demuth was a discussant for one of the sessions. Ivan also participated in the International Workshop on Language Production at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegan, The Netherlands. These were all excellent opportunities for the lab to stay informed about current research and build research networks. |