Research Interests
Language Acquisition
How do children learn language effortlessly? How does language development differ in children who are exposed to more than one language and/ or multiple variety of accents?
I investigate how growing up in a linguistically diverse environment impacts word learning.
Vocabulary Development
Children can learn new words at an incredible rate, even if their input contains huge variability (e.g., different accents and languages).
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I investigate how accent and language exposures affect vocabulary growth, and whether linguistic distance between the two languages in bilingual children moderates their vocabulary size.
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Recently, we have published a new study on how COVID-19 impacted vocabulary growth in infancy and toddlerhood.
Children as young as 2.5 years old adopt typically male or female speaking styles, despite the absence of sexual anatomical differences in vocal tract.
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In collaboration with Jessamyn Schertz, I explore how children learn to speak according to their gender and whether children also perceive gender differences in child speech.
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Currently, in a collaboration with Doug VanderLaan, we are conducting a study in Thailand to examine the development of gendered speech in gender diverse children.
Other Research Interests
Talker recognition, Statistical learning, Word segmentation, Cross-linguistic influence, Human-computer interaction