An overview of some of the studies underway.
Ece Demir is leading a study looking at early predictors of children’s reading comprehension. With respect to child measures, this study will examine how children’s early oral language, vocabulary and syntactic growth, relates to their reading comprehension growth during early school ages. Parental input and oral language comprehension will also be considered. See Reading Comprehension for more details.
With this broad line of research, Ece Demir et al. investigate the narrative development of both P2 (normally developing) and P3 (brain-injured) children. They examine not only children’s speech but also their gestures. Multiple story-stimuli (cartoons, a story stems, a picture book, and naturalistic interactions) are presented to child subjects in order to solicit their narrative re-tellings. See Narrative Development for more details.
In this study, Ece Demir et al. consider parental talk about letters and print related concepts during early home visits. They’re investigating (1) whether early literacy input is related to children’s later decoding outcomes; and (2) if the effect of literacy input is over and above factors such as parent SES or overall amount of input. See Literacy Study for more details.
In this study, Ece Demir et al. are investigating children’s writing skills and how different stages of writing (planning versus motor execution) are influenced by different word properties (such as frequency). They asked both P2 (normally developing) and P3 (brain-injured) children to write single words on CogSketch tablets. See Writing Skills for more details.
Ece Demir is leading a study examining the use of decontextualized language (language that is removed from the here-and-now) in the early home environment. The study is looking at both typically-developing children and children with early brain injury. For more info see Decontextualized Language.
Laura Schneidman is investigating the characteristics of speech overheard by children at 14 months and exploring variability in the attentional behaviors of children that might relate to their ability to learn from overheard speech. She’s found that speech overheard by children differ from speech directed to them in ways that may potentially make overheard speech a difficult source of input to learn lexical items from. See Directed/Overheard Speech for more details.
Erica, Dea and Susan Goldin-Meadow are investigating the development of noun phrases in speech and speech with gesture. For more info see Noun Phrase Study.
Matt Carlson is leading a study that seeks to derive improved measures of lexical richness (or vocabulary diversity). He’s exploring a range of techniques that address some of the inherent problems inherent in such a measure. For more information see Lexical Richness.
Matt Carlson is leading a study that seeks to describe the development of phonological structure in child and child-directed speech using metrics of word similarity and phonological probability The study aims to develop measures of phonological complexity that can be used to predict later language development such as decoding skills in reading. For more information see Phonological Complexity.
We are currently preparing to publish the set of words used by caregivers online as a resource for other researchers. This will take the form of a searchable database that returns word frequencies, the numbers of caregivers and children using the words, and related measures over the time course of the study. For more information see The World of Words.