Our research is focused on understanding how cognition and experience support word learning in infants, children, and adults from bilingual and monolingual backgrounds. We use both experimental and observational methods to conduct our research.
Below you will find descriptions of a few of our ongoing research studies.
Learning words from monolingual vs. bilingual environments
How do children learn the meanings of words when in a bilingual versus a monolingual environment? How does this ability change with age? In a series of studies, our lab is exploring how children learn the names of novel objects from ambiguous naming events that either resemble a monolingual or a bilingual environment. We are conducting these studies using a cross-situational word learning task, and test children’s learning of the names for the novel objects after training. To understand how this process changes across age, we test a large age range of children (4- to 7-years) and college students who are monolingual or bilingual. Our goal is to pinpoint how monolingual and bilingual word learning scenarios change learning.
This study is being conducted in partnership with the Children’s Museum of Phoenix.
This study has been pre-registered on the Open Science Framework here.
Shared reading of bilingual books
How does bilingualism affect parent-child reading interactions? Parent-child reading interactions provide rich language experiences for children, both with the contents of the book (Benitez et al., 2022) and the speech that caregivers provide to their children during book reading. These exchanges between parents and children aid their literacy development and word learning. We’re particularly interested in how these interactions occur between bilingual parents and their children. In this project, Spanish-English bilingual parents will be asked to read two books to their child: one single-language book (in English or Spanish) and one of two Spanish-English bilingual books. We are curious to see how parents interact with their child based on the languages written in the book.
We are currently seeking 3 to 4-year old Spanish-English bilingual children to participate in this online study via Zoom. Visit our sign-up page to find out how to participate.
This project is in collaboration with Developmental Psychologist Dr. Christine Potter from the Children’s Learning Project at University of Texas - El Paso.
This study has been pre-registered on the Open Science Framework here.
The linguistic and social features of Bilingual mother-child Play
The language that parents speak supports children’s language development, but how do bilingual parents use English and Spanish when speaking to their child? In this project, we are working with an existing large longitudinal data set of Mexican-American mothers and their children (Curci et al., 2020; Winstone et al., 2021). We are focused specifically on studying the linguistic and social interactions between mothers and their child. Using video recordings of mother-child free play, we are learning about the speech that mothers use with their child and the interactions between English and Spanish language use. Our goal is to identify the caregiver language behaviors that best support young children’s emerging bilingual language skills.
This study is being conducted using an existing data set from an ongoing longitudinal project set up to examine mental health and well being, Las Madres Nuevas.
parent-child play with familiar and unfamiliar objects
Parent-child toy play provides an important context for learning words (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019). Controlled laboratory experiments have demonstrated that young children rapidly learn a novel name for a novel object with only a few exposures (Benitez & Saffran, 2018). However, few studies have examined how language and play are structured between parents and children for optimal word learning when an unfamiliar object is introduced (Danis, 1997; Chen et al., 2021). To better understand how language and actions may promote learning about unfamiliar objects, this study will investigate how caregiver-child dyads play, talk, and interact with familiar and unfamiliar objects.
We are currently seeking 2 to 4-year-old English-speaking children and their parents to participate in this online study. Visit our sign up page to find out how to participate.
This study is being conducted in collaboration with Developmental Psychologist Dr. Kelsey Lucca and her team at the Emerging Minds Lab.
The role of sound symbolism in word learning
In this study, we are interested in how children use the sounds of words to decipher their meanings. Languages, including English, often have words that sound similar to their meaning. Consistent with this, our previous research with adults has found that words with the /i/ vowel (like in gleam) are perceived as having a more positive meaning, whereas words with the /^/ vowel (like in glum) are perceived as having a more negative meaning (McBeath, Yu, Barnes, & Benitez, 2021). To test this effect in children, we have them play a game online where they are shown a photo of a happy animal and a sad animal while they hear an audio recording of two novel words which sound like English words. The two words are different only in their vowel sounds (zeam or zum). The child is then asked to match one of the novel words to its picture. Findings from this study will contribute to our understanding of how children learn the meanings of words.
We are currently seeking 5- to 7-year-olds to participate. Visit our sign up page to find out how to participate.
This study has been pre-registered on the Open Science Framework here.
This study is being conducted in collaboration with cognitive scientist Dr. Michael McBeath.
UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF BILINGUALISM ON WORKING MEMORY
Speaking two languages requires a speaker to constantly manage attention between two linguistic systems. This process has been documented to benefit bilingual speakers’ executive functions in a number of ways, such as attention (Bialystok, 2007; Gunnerud et al., 2020). In this study, we aim to thoroughly examine the extent of such a bilingual effect in the domain of working memory among bilingual and monolingual adults, considering bilinguals’ language dominance at test, as well as controlling for adults’ cognitive and linguistic skills.
Monolingual and bilingual adults are invited to the lab to complete a series of computer-based tasks, including tasks to assess working memory (spatial and phonological), fluid intelligence, code switching, vocabulary, and language use. Bilinguals additionally complete working memory and vocabulary tasks administered in both of their dominant and non-dominant languages. Findings from this study will contribute to our understanding of how languages shape cognition.
We are currently seeking college students who speak English only or who speak English and Spanish/Mandarin Chinese to participate. Visit our ASU SONA page to sign in.