Child Language Lab Newsletter - June 2018

We have said farewell to Nyari Marunda, who has taken up a position elsewhere, and welcomed Isabel O'Keeffe as the new Lab Coordinator. Isabel graduated with a PhD in linguistics from the University of Melbourne last year with a thesis examining multilingualism and songs in Indigenous communities in western Arnhem Land. She is enjoying being part of the team and learning about all the exciting projects that are happening. She is looking forward to meeting and hearing from many of you and you can email her with any questions.

Professor Jason Hollowell is visiting for a year, as a Visiting Fellow, while on sabbatical from his university, Musashi University, in Tokyo, Japan. He writes:

Over the past ten years, I have shifted my research interests from the field of education, Second Language Acquisition, to First Language Acquisition, with a focus on language acquisition and cognitive development in children with profound hearing loss who use cochlear implants. I am especially interested in critical/sensitive periods and the developmental impact of sensory deficits in pre-lingual deaf children. On a personal level, I am an avid cyclist, enjoy various outdoor sports and, most importantly, cherish spending time with my wife and daughter, who is a bilateral cochlear implant recipient.

Dr Kyoji Iwamoto is a Visiting scholar from Waseda University and will be based at the Child Language Lab for 9 months. He is  interested in the relationship between children’s development of speech rate processing and language-specific phonological systems. While here at Macquarie, Kyoji will specifically be examining Australian English-speaking children’s development of lexical stress, or ‘rhythm’. We will soon be recruiting children aged 5 to 13 for his studies, so look out for these details on our Facebook page.

The Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (which the Child Language is a part of) recently hosted twelve Year 10 and 11 work experience students. Dr Ivan Yuen, Dr Nan Xu Rattasone and Dr Isabel O'Keeffe welcomed them to the Child Language Lab on Wednesday 30 May.

Ivan provided a hands-on demonstration of the use of ultrasound for speech planning research. Nan gave students the opportunity to trial the eye-tracking equipment in the perception lab and to learn how it is used for child language acquisition research.

The students enjoyed their time and we hope it has inspired some of them to become language researchers!

More than half of the children around the world grow up in bilingual environments. In English-speaking countries, including Australia, many children are Early Sequential Bilinguals (ESBs), who start learning their second language at preschool or school. Despite their increasing numbers, our knowledge of how ESBs acquire a second language (L2) is still very limited. 

This poses a challenge both for assessing school readiness, academic achievement, and for identifying those at risk for language disorders. ​

This workshop brings together international leaders in the field of bilingual research to discuss current issues in bilingual language acquisition.  It should be of interest to researchers, clinicians, educators, parents and the general public, with implications for all. The workshop is free and anyone is welcome to attend! Register by 20 July.

Guest presenter (and former Lab member!) Dr Kiri Mealings will present a one-day workshop on how the acoustics of classrooms and open plan innovative learning spaces affect primary school children’s speech perception abilities. This workshop will be useful for people who work in primary school classrooms; for example, teachers, principals, special education teachers, itinerant teachers of the deaf, audiologists, speech pathologists, classroom designers, parents. No previous knowledge on acoustics is needed.

By the end of this workshop, attendees should be able to:

• Better understand how noise affects children and teachers
• Understand the pros and cons of innovative learning environments
• Know how to measure and monitor noise levels in the classroom
• Understand how to design and work in classrooms so as to minimise noise levels/reverberation, and make them conducive environments for children’s learning

Australian Eye-tracking conference, 26-28 April, Macquarie University

In April, Macquarie University hosted the Australian Eye-tracking conference, a multidisciplinary event with the goal of providing a forum for cutting-edge eye-tracking (ET) research.

Deputy directors of the Child Language Lab, Dr Titia Benders and Dr Nan Xu Rattasone, were part of the organising committee and other members of the Lab assisted on the Program Committee, Technical Assistance Support Team and in chairing sessions.

Two of our postdoctoral fellows (Dr Carmen Kung and Dr Nan Xu Rattasone), and two of our PhD students (Ben Davies and Ping Tang and ) presented papers, which were well received. Topics covered included preschoolers' perception of Mandarin tones, what 3-year-olds with and without hearing loss know about plural grammar, and how 10 year-olds process sentences when reading.

The conference was well attended with around 100 national and international delegates. Keynote speakers were from the University of Western Australia, the University of Central Lancashire (UK) and the University of California LA (USA). They presented the latest research on social development, using eyetracking and neuroimaging methods together to better understand language processing  during reading, and in special populations (autism research).

Audiology Australia conference, 20-23 May, International Convention Centre, Sydney

In the constant search for a better understanding of how language is learned by children with hearing loss, several members of the Child Language Lab attended the Audiology Australia conference. The conference included presentations of innovative research in the science of the ear and hearing delivered by world-leading scholars and professionals. Keynote presentations included an extremely informative talk given by Professor Richard C. Dowell, Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology,

The University of Melbourne; an enlightening and entertaining presentation about single sided deafness given by Dr. Blake Pepsin from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), University of Toronto, Canada; and  a talk on memory and hearing in older couples by Professor Amanda Barnier, Macquarie University Department of Cognitive Science.

Three of our PhD students, Bec Holt, Ping Tang and Julien Millasseau, had the opportunity to actively participate in the conference as volunteers. Professor Katherine Demuth (Director of the CLL) and Professor Jason Hollowell (Visiting Fellow, Musashi University, Japan) were also present and took the opportunity to build bridges between the fields of linguistics, audiology, and hearing service provision for children in remote communities. In all, the conference served to better inform our lab members about current research on hearing loss and potential future directions for our own research.