No Images? Click here Child Language Lab Newsletter - December 2018Seasons Greetings from the Child Language Lab! 2018 has been a jam-packed year for the Lab and it is great to see the hard work of lab members paying off, with submitted theses and graduations, numerous published papers (see our website), presentations at international and local conferences and numerous and grants and awards (which you can read about below). You can also (re)read our February, June, and October newsletters if you missed any of our news during the year. You may also like to (re)watch the fantastic 3-minute-thesis presentations by lab PhD students Bec Holt and Julien Millasseau. Many of you reading this edition have participated in conferences, workshops or experiments during the year, so thank you very much for your contribution to the lab's ongoing research on language development in children. Opportunities to participate in current research studies are listed below and researchers will be testing over the school holidays. We are particularly seeking 9-year-old and 13-year-old children (who speak Australian English at home), so perhaps this could be a good holiday activity for someone you know? We would really appreciate it if you could forward details of studies to anyone who you think might be interested. The lab will be helping with and hosting some great events in the New Year, including the 4th Variation And Language Processing (VALP) conference (23-25 January) and the workshop 'Toward modelling the development of speech planning in production' (1-2 August) (more information in this edition). 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 for the festive season and a Happy New Year! Professor Katherine Demuth, Lab Director, ARC Laureate Fellow Call for participants: All studies available Speech Rhythm 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds who speak only Australian English at home. Audio-visual sentence processing 7-11-year-olds with either hearing aids or cochlear implants who have parents who speak Australian English at home. Speech Production 4-5-year-olds with a hearing impairment who have parents who speak Australian English at home. How do Australian English-speaking mothers and fathers talk to their babies? Australian English-speaking mothers and fathers with their 6-12-month-old infants. Want to know more or sign up for these studies? All participants will receive free parking and a Coles/Myer voucher for their time. For more information or to sign up for any of the studies, please contact Lab Coordinator, Isabel O'Keeffe. Call for participants: Featured study How to Australian-English-speaking mothers and fathers talk to their babies? We are currently recruiting mothers, fathers and their infants who want to help us answer this question. What does the study involve?
Can I take part?
For more information, please contact Lab Coordinator, Isabel O'Keeffe. New lab member/tiny potential participant! We are thrilled to introduce new lab member/tiny potential participant, Franklin Davies, who was born to lab member Ben Davies and his wife Caitlin on 13 November 2018. Congratulations to Ben and Caitlin and we look forward to recruiting Franklin for future studies of infant and child language development! Congratulations to Ping on his thesis submission and Boston University awards! Congratulations to Ping Tang who submitted his thesis 'Children's Acquisition of Mandarin Tones in Context' in October 2018. He has recently received his examiner comments and he has passed with no amendments! In his abstract, Ping summarises his findings, writing: "the findings of thesis suggest that contextual tones are not later acquired by normal hearing children, as suggested by previous studies, and acquiring typical contextual tones is possible for children with hearing impairment as long as they receive CIs [Cochlear Implants] early." Ping's research has also won him two awards from the prestigious Boston University Conference on Language Development: the Diversity EnAward and award for best student paper. Congratulations to Nan & Ping for being awarded the Dr Li Sze Lim Mobility scholarship Researchers from the Child Language Lab, Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone and PhD student Ping Tang, have recently been awarded the Dr Li Sze Lim mobility scholarship for their project ‘Improving Child Hearing Health in China: Assessing Tone Acquisition by Children with Cochlear Implants’. This scholarship was made possible through a major donation by Dr Li Sze Lim who is a keen supporter of student and academic research mobility between China, Hong Kong and Australia. The project focuses on the issue of tone acquisition for children with Cochlear Implants (CI) learning Chinese Mandarin. Despite important advances in Cochlear Implant technology, children learning tonal languages, such as Chinese Mandarin continue to experience challenges in acquiring tone. This problem affects approximately 4.6 million children with profound hearing loss in China. Access to pitch information is challenging for children with CIs but is essential for learning a tone language like Mandarin, where tone is used to distinguish the meanings of words. This is compounded by complex tone change processes in connected speech. This project builds on Ping Tang’s PhD work which showed that implantation by age 2 not only provides benefits to acquiring lexical tone but, more crucially, is essential for acquiring tonal processes in connected speech. The goal of this project is to identify more children who are implanted even earlier, before the age of 2, to establish their ability to comprehend and produce tones in connected speech. The scholarship will enable Ping to travel back to China to test these children, with assistance from Chinese research collaborators Professor Gao Liquan (Beijing Language and Culture) and Professor Wentao Gu (Nanjing Normal University). In China, most children are still being implanted after the age of 2. This results in poor listening and speaking skills, which may lead to social isolation and poor academic outcomes. This project is therefore extremely timely and will be the first study to provide a comprehensive investigation of the impact of early implantation on Mandarin tone in connected speech, with wide-spread implications for clinical practice in hearing health (audiology and speech pathology), clinical training, education, and hearing health policy and planning. It will benefit an enormous number of children in China alone, as well as children learning Mandarin Chinese in other countries and children speaking many of the other tonal languages around the world. This project will also continue to foster strong engagements between Macquarie University researchers based at the Australian Hearing Hub and Chinese researchers. This project was recently highlighted in Macquarie University's Lighthouse web news. Congratulations to Carmen for successfully defending her thesis Congratulations to lab postdoctoral fellow, Dr Carmen Kung, who successfully defended her PhD thesis at Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour, Radbound University, The Netherlands. Her thesis was titled 'Speech comprehension in a tone language - The role of lexical tone, context, and intonation in Cantonese Chinese.' As she concludes in her abstract: "The findings reveal an immediate interaction between the processing of lexical tone, intonation and context. Importantly, these two types of context appear to be the dominating factor in the comprehension of lexical and pragmatic meaning. In addition, the empirical chapters provide experimental paradigms that can be used, in future research, as tools for investigations of speech comprehension in other tone languages." Congratulations to Thembi on the Academic Excellence Award from the Zimbabwean Achievers Awards (Australian Edition) Congratulations to lab member Sisthembinkosi 'Thembi' Dube on winning the Academic Excellence Award from the Zimbabwean Achievers Awards held in Melbourne on 24 November 2018. These were awarded as an acknowledgement of her academic achievements and contributions (teaching at various universities in Sydney) in the Australian community. Congratulations to Chi for submitting his thesis Congratluations to lab PhD student, Chi Lo, who recently submitted his PhD thesis "Benefits of music training for children with hearing loss." This year he also helped to set up a two-day science camp for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), which you can read more about in Macquarie University's 'This Week'. Congratulations to Jae and Ping for Macquarie University Faculty of Human Sciences Awards It was fantastic to see the research of lab members Jae-Hyun Kim and Ping Tang recognised in awards from Macquarie University's Faculty of Human Sciences in the awards ceremony on Wednesday 12 December. Jae received an Early Career Researcher award and Ping received a PhD award. Congratulations to Katherine, Felicity and Titia on a joint ARC Linkage Grant with other colleagues Congratulations to Lab members Professor Katherine Demuth, Dr Titia Benders and Associate Professor Felicity Cox for being part of a newly awarded ARC Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment & Facilities (LIEF) grant, along with colleagues Dr Beena Ahmed, Professor Kirrie Ballard, Professor Denis Burnham; Associate Professor Julien Epps, Dr Vidhyasaharan Sethu, Associate Professor Joanne Arciuli, Dr Barbara Kelly, Dr Chloé Diskin, Associate Professor Chwee Beng Lee, Professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah, Dr Elise Baker. Here is their project description: "This project aims to create a large, publicly accessible corpus of annotated Australian children’s speech, which is currently lacking both in Australia and internationally. This corpus will provide the basic infrastructure vital for innovative research on children’s speech and the training of speech scientists and engineers. It is expected to be used by researchers working on speech analysis, processing and speech recognition to develop applications for use in the areas of psychology, education, linguistics, speech and language pathology, as well as any area that has potential to use speech-controlled software to engage children in health and education activities. This project will provide significant benefits, including applications such as remote speech therapy, interactive reading tutors, pronunciation coaching and educational games." Good news: ongoing funding for the Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) at Macquarie University The Centre for Language Sciences (CLas), which the lab is part of, will receive another 3 years of funding! The Centre brings together researchers from Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Educational Studies and Computing working on experimental issues in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, speech and hearing science, brain imaging and computational linguistics. The Centre's main focus for 2019-2021 will be research on language development in children and young people with hearing loss, which aligns closely with much of the Child Language Lab's current research. We look forward to ongoing collaborative workshops and events like those pictured (see more about these events on the CLaS website). Upcoming Event: Variation and Language Processing conference The 4th Variation and Language Processing Conference (VALP4) will be held at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia from 23-25 January 2019, after successful previous conferences in the UK, New Zealand and the United States. This conference provides a venue for researchers coming from traditionally distinct fields, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, experimental phonetics, syntax and pragmatics, who work on the relationship between linguistic variation in its widest sense and language processing. Keynote speakers include:
For more information and registration, please see the VALP4 conference website. Upcoming Event: Toward modelling the development of speech planning in production Models of human speech production developed over the past few decades have been shaped by a number of sources of information, including linguistic theory, observational studies and experimental studies of both typical and atypical adult speakers. But few studies have addressed the question of the developmental course of changes in the speech production process in children who are learning to talk. The goal of this workshop is therefore to bring together researchers working on models of speech production planning to explore methods suitable for testing hypotheses about the role of higher-level structure in these processes in both adults and children aged 2-12, with special focus on the development of speech planning mechanisms during the course of language acquisition. Keynote speakers include:
The workshop will be held at Macquarie University and is being organised by members of the Lab. We are currently inviting abstracts for talks and posters, with the submission deadline on 1 February 2019. For more information on submission of abstracts and registration, please see the workshop website. Conference report: Asia-Pacific Babylab Constellation conference Lab Deputy Director, Titia Benders, presented at the inaugural Asia-Pacific Babylab Constellation (ABC) conference in Singapore, 4-5 November. The conference was designed to showcase language acquisition research in the Asia-Pacific region. Titia gave a poster presentation 'The four-way stop voicing contrast in Nepali infant-directed speech: Another case of hypo-articulation' (co-authored with Sujal Pokharel and Katherine Demuth). The paper is due for publication in early 2019, so stay tuned to read it and hear more about it. Conference report: Boston University Conference on Language Development Lab Director Katherine Demuth, along with Deputy Director Titia Benders and PhD student Ping Tang attended the prestigious Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 2-4 November. Ping presented his paper "The acquisition of Mandarin tonal processes by children with cochlear implants", Titia presented her paper "Hypo-articulation in infant-directed speech: The case of the Nepali four-way stop voicing contrast" and Katherine presented the poster "Acquisition of plural morphology by preschoolers with hearing loss." All were well-received with lots of great discussions and questions. It was a fantastic opportunity for Child Language Lab researchers to share their research and build networks with other leading researchers on different aspects of child language acquisition. Conference report: ProsLang Workshop Katherine Demuth, Ivan Yuen and Ping Tang attended the ProsLang Workshop on the Processing of Prosody across Languages and Varieties conference in Wellington, New Zealand, 29-30 November. Ivan presented his paper 'Six-year-olds use pitch, not duration, to mark focus in Australian English' (co-authored with Nan Xu Rattanasone and Katherine Demuth). You can read the abstracts on the ProsLang website. Conference report: Speech Science & Technology conference Lab Director Katherine Demuth gave a keynote presentation, 'Developmental perspectives on speech planning and production,' at the 17th Speech Science and Technology conference, held in Coogee, 4-7 December. Lab members Elise Tobin and Titia Benders presented papers and Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, Julien Millasseau, Michael Proctor, Felicity Cox and Laurence Bruggeman presented posters. Lab PhD students Bec Holt, Ping Tang and Kyoji Iwamoto also attended. Errata: Nan's first PhD student to graduate was not Ben Davies, but Hui Chen! In the October edition of the Child Language Lab newsletter, it was incorrectly reported that Ben Davies was Nan's first PhD student to graduate. However, Nan's first PhD student to graduate was Hui Chen. Hui is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (LPP Babylab) at the Université Paris Descartes & CNRS and you can read more about her work here. |