2015 New Century Scholars Research Grant
Verb Processing and Verb Acquisition in Late Talking Toddlers
What originally sparked your interest in your research?
My fascination with language began in middle school, where language classes were always my favorite. I took Spanish and even had the opportunity to learn a bit of Japanese. In high school, I added Latin to my studies. This early passion for languages continued into college when someone suggested I explore linguistics—a field I wasn’t familiar with at the time. However, once I took my first class, I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do.
As an undergraduate, it was challenging to get involved in linguistics research because of the heavy theoretical background needed. However, psycholinguistics offered a more hands-on path, and I began working in research labs to gain experience. Eventually, I pursued my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was fortunate to work with wonderful mentors.
I’m a developmental psycholinguist, and my research focuses on understanding how language learning works. In my work that was sparked by the New Century Scholars Grant, I focused particularly for late talkers. This line of research has always felt like a mystery to solve: What makes a child a late talker? And what determines whether they will catch up and develop typical language skills, or continue to struggle? I'm particularly interested in the mechanisms that underlie language learning, like how children acquire word meanings and basic grammatical structures.
The big question for me is whether there are specific learning mechanisms that some children either aren’t using or aren’t using effectively. My research explores whether there are differences between late talkers and typical talkers in how they use these mechanisms. By studying this, I hope to help identify which late talkers are more likely to develop typical language skills and which may need additional support as they grow.
What problem are you hoping your work will solve? How could this potentially affect clinicians and/or consumers?
My work aims to uncover the mechanistic differences in language learning across populations. By understanding these differences, clinicians could identify earlier whether a child is using certain learning mechanisms effectively. This would allow for better predictions about which children will develop typical language skills and which ones might benefit from early intervention. Additionally, this knowledge could shape interventions to target specific mechanisms that aren’t working well or create workarounds that leverage a child’s strengths.
For example, in cases like autism, where joint attention is often a challenge, many interventions focus on improving this skill. However, if the goal is to enhance language abilities, it might be more effective to bypass joint attention and focus on strengths that allow language development without relying on that specific mechanism. Similarly, if late talkers struggle with learning verb meanings through syntax, clinicians could shift the focus to another strategy that better suits their strengths.
By tailoring interventions in this way, clinicians could offer more effective, personalized strategies that align with each child's unique abilities, ultimately improving outcomes for children with language difficulties.
How are you approaching this work? What are the steps?
This project has evolved through several stages, starting with an initial experiment developed alongside a doctoral student, Sabrina Horvath, whose dissertation focused on late talkers. That experiment provided clear, interpretable results, helping us take the first step toward understanding late talkers’ learning mechanisms. Since then, my work has expanded to investigate the composition of late talkers’ vocabularies, comparing the words they know to those of typical talkers.
My approach involves three key components: controlled experiments, real-world observations, and vocabulary analysis. The experiments compare how late talkers and typical talkers learn new words in a controlled setting. While informative, these experiments don’t reflect real life, which is why another aspect of my work focuses on understanding the vocabulary late talkers already have.
The third and most complex step is examining real-life interactions between late talkers and their families. This involves analyzing videos of parent-child interactions at multiple time points to track changes in both the parent’s and child’s language use. By understanding these trajectories, we hope to uncover why some late talkers catch up while others don’t.
Additionally, I plan to develop experiments where parents interact with their children in more natural settings, allowing us to study how they introduce new words and how their children respond. This will help us generate hypotheses that can be tested in future studies.
What specific obstacles were/are there in getting this research started? How did the ASHFoundation grant help you overcome these obstacles?
One of the key obstacles in starting this research was my initial unfamiliarity with the topic. Although I was interested in late talkers, it was a new area for me, and without the ASHFoundation grant, I likely wouldn’t have pursued it. The grant was crucial because it specifically supports researchers shifting into new areas, allowing me to take the leap. Without that funding, it would have been too risky and expensive to dive into something unfamiliar.
Another major challenge was the lack of structured ways to study late talkers. Since late talkers are not a clinically defined group, there isn’t a clear place to recruit participants or find relevant data. Leslie Rescorla, a leading expert in the field, provided invaluable guidance here. Thanks to the grant, I was able to work with her more actively, and she taught me essential, practical knowledge that isn’t found in textbooks—like how to recruit late talkers and communicate with parents who might not even realize their child fits into this category. Her insights helped overcome the recruitment challenge, showing me how to engage worried parents who had been told to simply "wait and see."
This project also influenced my broader thinking, helping me view language development as an individual trajectory for each child. Understanding which children need early language support versus those who may not was a challenge this work aims to address, and the ASHFoundation grant enabled me to start tackling that issue.