• Department of Psychology Program Project

Language Project

Language Project

The program project is a longitudinal study on the development of language and gesture in typically developing children and in children with early brain injury. Participating families are visited three times a year in their homes. The study has already followed children from 14 months to 6 years of age, and we are planning to continue observations for another 5 years.

Administrator in charge:
Kristi Schonwald

Principal Investigators for the Program Project

Susan Goldin-Meadow
email: sgm@uchicago.edu
http://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu/

Janellen Huttenlocher
email: hutt@uchicago.edu
http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/jhuttenlocher.shtml

Susan Levine
email: s-levine@uchicago.edu
http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/slevine.shtml

Steven Small
email: small@uchicago.edu
http://www.fmri.uchicago.edu/people/small.html

Research assistants working with children with early brain injury:

  Megan Broughan

Sarah Gripshover

Sarah graduated from the University of Chicago in 2005 with a BA in Linguistics. Since then, she has worked on the language project studying brain injured children. As part of her work on this project, Sarah collects and transcribes spontaneous speech and gesture data, analyzes the complexity of the children's speech, and has begun to study their phonological development. Sarah also co-authored a poster for the SRCLD conference in 2006, entitled Gesture Development in Children with Early Unilateral Brain Injury. She hopes to pursue graduate-level research in psycholinguistics or education.
email: sarahg@uchicago.edu

Julia Rao

Julia graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison May '07 with a BS in Psychology. She is currently working as a research assistant for the Language Project and is busy studying the importance of gesture in language development. She also has experience researching the symptom domains of autism through fMRI and studying emotional development in typically developing twins. She is interested in applying to graduate programs in clinical psychology, with a specialization in child neuropsychology.
email: jarao@uchicago.edu

Meredith Simone

Meredith has a BS in Psychology from the University of Iowa. There, she worked in the Spatial Planning and Memory lab with Professor John P. Spencer. She has been with the project for 3 years and is currently responsible for visiting a handful of children with early brain injury and the gesture coding and data entry for the brain injury group. She is attending Midwestern University pursuing a Masters in Occupational Therapy.
email: msimone@uchicago.edu

Research assistants working with typically developing children:

Lauren King

Calla Trofatter

Calla graduated from the University of Chicago in 2005 with a BA in Neuroscience. She has been working as a research assistant for the Language Project since then and has become specifically interested in the interactions between gesture, speech and cognition. She is currently considering graduate programs in psychology, language development or linguistics, and hopes to pursue a career in language research or speech language pathology.
email: lalaith@uchicago.edu

Annie Yaniga

Postdocs

Joan Fisher

My post-doctoral research is being conducted as part of the longitudinal program project involving Susan Levine, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Janellen Huttenlocher and Steven Small. My primary role is to investigate language and gesture development in children with unilateral lesions acquired early in life. I have developed a storytelling task, combined with MRI and NIRS technologies, to investigate the development of narrative skills.
email: joan@uchicago.edu
Website: (http://home.uchicago.edu/~joan/)

Seyda Ozcaliskan

My research centers on spatial language and cognition, focusing on both literal (e.g., He ran into the house) and metaphorical motion (e.g., The idea runs through his mind). I use a crosslinguistic-developmental framework to identify universals and language-specific patterns in the linguistic organization of motion in space. My research questions focus on the cognitive outcomes of crosslinguistic variation in spatial language and how children learn to talk and think about literal and metaphorical motion through space as they become native speakers of a particular language. Currently, I am in the process of studying the spontaneous gestures that accompany metaphorical language, with the goal of understanding what spontaneous gestures reveal about the underlying cognitive organization of metaphorically structured concepts.
email: seyda@uchicago.edu
Website: https://home.uchicago.edu/~seyda/

Shannon Pruden

My current research explores when and how children acquire both the spatial concepts and words that map on to relational terms like motion verbs, spatial prepositions, and spatial adjectives. In my previous research I examined infants' ability to abstract spatial concepts that are eventually encoded in relational terms (e.g. path and manner). My current research continues this line of research and asks whether gesture plays a role in the acquisition of these spatial concepts and words.
email: spruden@uchicago.edu
Website: (http://home.uchicago.edu/~spruden/)

Meredith Rowe

I am interested in how caregivers communicate (verbally and nonverbally) with young language-learning children during everyday interactions. My current work focuses on investigating relationships between parental speech and gesture, and on uncovering factors that may help explain variations across mothers in the quantity and quality of verbal and nonverbal communicative input they offer their children.
email: rowemer@uchicago.edu

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