My research focuses on how the human language processing system copes with adversity and how children’s early experiences shape their language development and educational outcomes.  Much of my research focuses on adverse listening conditions, and I am recognized internationally as an expert on how noise impacts infants and young children.Children’s classrooms are constantly noisy, with the sounds of coughs, shuffling papers, and shifting bodies.  These sources of noise have the potential to reduce both our ability to understand other speakers, and our ability to learn new information; but surprisingly, the types of noise that are most detrimental to adults are not the types most detrimental to children. Understanding the extent to which different types of noise interfere with children’s learning and adult’s understanding has profound implications for our schools and daycare centers.

Most recently, I have been looking at how children’s experiences lead them to approach the task of learning language in different ways. In particular, I have begun examining how noise in the home environment impacts individual children’s language development. Children’s homes vary substantially in their typical noise levels, due to such factors as neighborhood characteristics, household density, and proximity to industrial or traffic noise.  But while noise in the home might be detrimental for building language skills, experience with noise could be necessary to stimulate the development of selective attention skills.  Importantly, this research goes beyond a simple notion that “noise is bad”, and focuses on how particular types of experiences may influence the ways in which a child learns.

Over the past decade, I have begun comparative work across species, looking specifically at dogs.  Our canine companions serve as a fascinating comparison to young children: like children, they hear adults talking both around and to them on a regular basis.  Moreover, they can learn words, both through explicit teaching (e.g., commands such as “sit” and “stay”) and simply through exposure (as demonstrated by a typical dog’s excited response to a word such as “walk” or “treat”).  We have shown that dogs listen longer to their own name than to other dogs’ names, even when spoken by an unfamiliar talker.  They can also do so in the presence of background noise (at levels better than young children), and from degraded signals. They recognize the difference between the language typically spoken in their environment than (at least some) other languages, demonstrating a sensitivity to acoustic regularities in the input.  More generally, studying dogs as well as young children provides an intriguing comparison that helps to address which aspects of language processing are truly linguistic in nature vs. which may be part of our more basic mammalian cognitive and auditory systems.

As part of my commitment to supporting research more broadly, I recognized an unmet need in the infant language research community. One of the cornerstone methods for studying early language development, the headturn preference procedure (or HPP) was becoming unavailable to most researchers.  Recognizing the need for a new system, I led an international team of scientists, funded by the US National Science Foundation, to create a new software and hardware system, using off-the-shelf components, that could be set up with minimal cost across multiple sites in a uniform manner to enhance cross-site research collaborations. Moreover, we created the system to run not only HPP, but several other key infant testing protocols (Preferential Looking, Visual Fixation/Habituation, Conditioned Headturn), making it ideal for new investigators who have limited resources and/or laboratory space for multiple testing setups.  More information on this system, the Behavioral Infant and Toddler Testing System, or BITTSy, is available at http://langdev.umd.edu/bittsy/.

Visit our labs:  The Language Development & Perception Lab and the Canine Language Perception Lab.

ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1626-4241