Codeswitching–when someone switches between two or more languages while speaking–is a very common phenomenon in people who are bilingual. ‘Spanglish’ is a well-known example of codeswitching as it is a colloquial term for speaking in a mix of Spanish and English.
Language Development
Rebecca Alper, PhD – Slide of the Week
Childhood trauma is pervasive and can have widespread negative influences on language development.
Integrating trauma awareness into early language support
Learning language in early childhood occurs through interaction between children and their caregivers. It is a foundational process that allows children to participate in social interactions, learn from the world, and develop other essential skills such as literacy. Having a language delay or disorder is associated with greater risk for experiencing trauma and vice versa. Furthermore, children’s and caregivers’ trauma histories can impact their individual strengths and needs related to participation in early language intervention.
BuILD Study (Brain Imaging and Language Development in Infants with Down Syndrome) (Dean)
Recruiting parents of children with Down Syndrome who are between 1 and 24 months old.
Research seeks strategies to optimize dual language learning in bilingual children
Bilingual children can be flexible in the ways they learn two languages simultaneously.
The Little Listeners Project: studying language development in toddlers with autism
Even through cute but unintelligible babbles, infants are hard at work learning how to become successful communicators.
Susan Ellis Weismer, PhD – Slide of the Week
The present study used an eye-gaze task to evaluate predictive language processing among 3- to 4-year-old autistic children (n = 34) and 1.5- to 3-year-old, language-matched neurotypical (NT) children (n = 34).
Jenny Saffran, PhD – Slide of the Week
How do learners gather new information during word learning? One possibility is that learners selectively sample items that help them reduce uncertainty about new word meanings.
Expecting to learn: Language acquisition in toddlers improved by predictable situations
In an upcoming study in Current Biology, published online Aug. 16, researchers at the Arizona State University Department of Psychology and the Waisman Center report a factor that is important for language learning in children: the predictability of the learning environment.
Jenny Saffran, PhD – Slide of the Week
Children use the presence of familiar objects with known names to identify the correct referents of novel words. In natural environments, objects vary widely in salience. The presence of familiar objects may sometimes hinder rather than help word learning.