The Ins and Outs of Language Development: Integrating Multiple Measures from Inside and Outside the Laboratory

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

This symposium highlights exciting work using multiple measures of language processing including controlled laboratory experiments and measures of day-to-day input to understand the interactive processes of language development. We feature work from multiple countries, languages, and age groups and include atypical populations.
Talk 1 links the acoustic proprieties of parent's speech while reading a child-friendly book, and their 8-9-month-old Norwegian infant’s language abilities. This work integrates a fine-grained analysis of parental speech, with measures of infant’s word comprehension and vocabulary size.
Talk 2 investigates the role of different aspects of infants’ early linguistic environment such as quantity and quality of input, talker variability, syntax and referential transparency, on children’s language abilities. These proprieties are extracted from a longitudinal corpus of 6-17 months old North American children and related to the same children vocabulary at several time points.
Talk 3 presents longitudinal home language recordings in the UK and an eye-tracking laboratory measure to clarify the relationship between children's natural language input and their comprehension, speed of processing, referent selection and retention abilities at 18 months.
Talk 4 examines autistic and control children’s social networks in North American preschool classrooms and language abilities via language input recordings and location trackers. Findings show that the more central a child is to their network, the higher they score on a language assessment, regardless of their diagnosis.
Integrating multiple measures and automatized methods both in and out of the laboratory can provide new insight on the multiple processes and cognitive abilities supporting language development.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Laia Fibla Reixachs, University of East Anglia

Individual Presentations

• The Role of Parental Speech in Infant Language Development: Insights from 8-9-month-old Norwegian Infants  - Presenting Author: Natalia Kartushina, University of Oslo, Norway; Non-Presenting Author: Silje Robberstad, University of Oslo; Non-Presenting Author: Julien Mayor, University of Oslo

• Links between Language Input in Infancy and Vocabulary in Childhood - Presenting Author: Shannon Dailey, Duke Univeristy; Non-Presenting Author: Federica Bulgarelli, Duke University; Non-Presenting Author: Elika Bergelson, Duke Univeristy

• Relating Language Input to Language Processes Early in Development - Presenting Author: Laia Fibla Reixachs, University of East Anglia; Non-Presenting Author: John P Spencer, University of East Anglia; Non-Presenting Author: Larissa K Samuelson, University of East Anglia

• Automated Measurement of Social Networks and Language Development in Inclusive Preschool Classrooms - Presenting Author: Regina Fasano, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Lynn K Perry, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Yi Zhang, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Vitale, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Chaoming Song, University of Miami; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel Messinger, University of Miami