At the LEMuR lab, we aim to answer questions such as:
How do children learn new words?
How does bilingualism impact this process?
What factors support language learning in children?
How do cognitive and social skills interact with linguistic abilities?
How does language-learning take place in children with language difficulties, like autism?
What are the consequences of bilingualism on language development in children with language impairments?
Current Projects
Impact of speaker reliability on novel word learning in monolingual and bilingual children: A retention study
During the language learning process, young children are attentive to a speaker’s past accuracy in naming things, and they show a preference for learning new information from accurate, reliable speakers rather than from inaccurate, unreliable speakers. In this study, we are trying to find out if and how children remember new words taught by different speakers, and whether this process is different for monolingual and bilingual children.
Data from this project will help us understand if and how word-learning cues, like speaker reliability and others, can support language learning in children from diverse backgrounds. It can tell us how to build successful educational strategies and intervention techniques that are designed specifically for bilingual children, and will be the foundation for future work on supporting learning in bilingual children with communication and social impairments.
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Word-learning mechanisms in bilingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: The use of social-pragmatic cues
Presently, there is an unsupported but common belief that bilingually exposed children with ASD may experience additional delays in language development. Only recently have researchers begun to examine this question empirically and initial findings seem to indicate that bilingualism does not appear to negatively impact language development in children with ASD and may even serve as a protective factor against some cognitive and communicative difficulties. To add to this growing body of literature, we will assess how social-pragmatic cues impact word learning in children with autism growing up in dual-language environments.
Data from this work will serve as the foundation for future LEMuR projects which, in turn, will help build a rich body of knowledge of the impact of bilingualism on children with ASD. This will then serve all caregivers in providing evidence-based care for children over the course of their language-learning.
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Perspectives on Bilingualism and Language Development
In the last decade, a number of empirical studies have indicated that bilingualism does not appear to negatively impact language development in children with ASD. However, it still remains a common belief that bilingually exposed children with ASD may experience additional delays in language development. As a result, some professionals like Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) continue to advise parents of children with ASD to limit bilingual exposure at home. Yet, the extent and origins of such practices and attitudes towards bilingualism by SLPs are still unknown.
Data from this work aims to understand the present-day perspectives of SLPs towards bilingualism, their reasonings for recommendations made in favor of or against bilingualism in children with ASD, how these decisions are made, and where they learned about it. There is a pressing need in the field to understand the impact of bilingual exposure on language development in children with ASD, and answers to these questions will provide insights on how to forward clinically relevant research in this area.
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The role of mutual exclusivity and speaker reliability in monolingual and bilingual children’s novel word learning
Children use many different cues in the process of early word learning (Hollich et al., 2000). Two powerful cues that have been shown to impact children’s word learning are a speaker’s reliability (i.e., how accurate has someone been in the past about naming new objects) and a child’s cognitive strategies, such as mutual exclusivity (i.e., an object can have only one name). Moreover, these cues can differentially affect word learning in children from different sociolinguistic backgrounds, like monolingual and bilingual children (Gangopadhyay & Kaushanskaya, 2022; Kalashnikova et al., 2014). However, speaker reliability and mutual exclusivity cues have only been explored in isolation, and their combined effect on children’s word learning is unknown. In this study, we are trying to find out how these cues jointly contribute to word learning in monolingual and bilingual children.
Data from this project will help us understand if these cues are used equally or if children rely on one cue more than the other depending on the situation and their linguistic background. It will help us identify the processes that are involved in successful word learning in children, thereby, informing parents, teachers, and clinicians on how best to enable learning in all children. It will also help us formulate better intervention techniques and educational strategies for bilingual children while forming a foundation for future research on understanding word learning in children with communication and social impairments from diverse linguistic backgrounds.
Future Directions
Children's communicatve development is truly incredible! They manage to learn so much in their first 10 years, and that carries them through the rest of their lives. Overall, our goal, at the LEMuR Lab, is to better understand how both monolingual and bilingual children, with and without communication difficulties, learn language. This, in turn, will help parents, teachers, and clinicians better aid all children in their communicative development!
Present Funding
Social Sciences Research Funding Program, Indiana University - Bloomington
