Catherine E. Laing

I'm a Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University, Wales. I did my postdoc in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, North Carolina, working with Elika Bergelson at the Bergelson Lab. Before I moved to Duke I taught Psycholinguistics at the University of York, UK, where I completed my PhD in Linguistics. You can find out more about that here.

My research focuses on early language development, and I'm particularly interested in the transition from babble to speech. I'm currently working on two projects which consider how the early home environment supports infant language acquisition. I am analyzing caregiver speech, with particular focus on phonology and 'input quality'. My PhD is titled "What does the cow say?" An exploratory analysis of onomatopoeia in early word production. My research analyzed the use of onomatopoeia in infant and caregiver speech, with a focus on the question of why infants produce a high number of onomatopoeia in their early word forms. You can read all about it here.

My work brings together perspectives from production and perception, with a particular focus on phonological development. My research to-date has used eye-tracking and fine-grained acoustic analysis to observe infants' perception of language, alongside the consideration of early vocalizations and the manipulation of prosody in infant communication.

In my spare time I love hiking and running in the countryside, baking bread, and curling up on the sofa with my cat and a good book.

Contact: LaingC@cardiff ac uk [replace spaces with dots :) ]

Twitter: @cathelaing24

Blog: https://medium.com/@cathelaing24



Photo credit (above): Ian Martindale