Current Research

We are looking for Canadian mothers* of 18- to 24-month-old infants who primarily speak English to their child. 

• The data we gather will be compared with data gathered from other English-speaking countries (i.e., England, UK). 

Our study focuses on two dialects of English. Specifically, Canadian English and West Midlands English in the UK. We have already finished our UK phase of the study, and we are currently looking for Canadian mothers with children between the ages of 18- to 24-months. We are interested in finding out whether English-speaking Canadian and UK mothers use the same characteristics in their child-directed speech.

*This study is specifically for mothers. Fathers are not included only because the variability of vocal pitch. Other studies include any caregiver.  

We are looking for monolingual English families of 14- to 16-month-old infants.

• We are currently working on a new study, and we're almost ready for it! In this study, we want to determine whether words from other languages can be associated with a new object. We will investigate whether infants can use sound-meaning links to learn how to identify new, foreign words. 

We found that 9-month-olds know the difference between two speech sounds - but not always. 

• We have finished up with our study, and we're preparing to show what we found. 

Many researchers have found that, over time and depending on the category of speech sounds (vowels, consonants), infants start to focus on their native language while they lose speech sounds that they don't use.

Our study tested French and English 9-month-olds. We found that when the infants were presented with the stimuli (/bla/, /gla/, /dla/), they were able to hear the difference between /bla/ and /dla/. However, that wasn't the case for /gla/ and /dla/. We are still working on why there is a difference between /gla/ and /dla/.