- 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 currently funded to continue observations for another 5 years.
Administrator in charge:
Kristi Schonwald
email: kschonwa@uchicago.edu
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.humanneuroscience.org/people/bio/small.php
Research assistants
Megan Broughan
email: mbroughan@uchicago.edu
Ashley Drake
Ashley graduated from Bucknell University in 2008 with a B.A. in Psychology and Anthropology and began working with the Language Project that following summer. Within the realm of the project, she has become specifically intrigued in the role culture plays with the development of gesture. She plans to pursue a career in Psychological Anthropology in order to continue her "breast ironing" research in Cameroon, West Africa.
email: adrake@uchicago.edu
Sam graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2008 with a BA in Cognitive Science. Sam joined the Language Development Project in July of 2008 where she works with children with early brain injury. Sam is interested in understanding the nature of normal cognition by studying patterns in cases of early brain injury. She hopes to pursue a PhD in Cognitive Science or a related discipline.
email: sengel@uchicago.edu
Lauren Graham
Lauren grew up in Kansas City, Kansas and then attended the University of Denver where she majored in psychology. She began working as a visit RA for the Language Development Project in July of 2008. In the future she hopes to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology with a focus on children and adolescents.
email: laurent.graham@gmail.com
Max Masich
Max began his studies at Pennsylvania State University, transferring to the University of Chicago before his second year. After spending his third year studying at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, he returned to the University of Chicago to receive his BA in Linguistics in 2007. He was exposed to the field of developmental psychology during that last year, when he took a course sequence on the mind which included talks from Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Levine. Max has transcribed visits and coded syntax with the Language Development Project since May 2008, and hopes someday to pursue a PhD in developmental psychology or psycholinguistics.
email: mmasich@uchicago.edu
email: k.walters123@gmail.com
Kristin Weisler
Kristin graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2008 with a BA in Psychology. There, she studied early language development with Professor Nameera Akhtar. Kristin is responsible for coding gestures of the typically developing children and children with early brain injury. Her research interests primarily lie in social factors that contribute to language acquisition, as well as social factors that contribute to academic success. Kristin hopes to pursue a career in developmental or school psychology.
email: kweisler@uchicago.edu
Annie Yaniga
email: ayaniga@uchicago.edu
Postdocs
My primary role in the longitudinal language project is to analyze the MRI data on the children with unilateral lesions acquired early in life who are participating in the Language Project. I have also developed a storytelling task to evaluate the development of narrative skills in typically developing children compared to children with early brain injury.
email: joan@uchicago.edu
Website: (http://home.uchicago.edu/~joan/)
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/)
My work is centered on understanding individual differences in children's early language development and in how parents communicate with children. As a part of the project I have studied: 1) the relation between early gesture and later language learning, 2) the role of linguistic input in child language development for typically-developing children and children with brain injury, and 3) relations between socioeconomic status and parental talk to children. Currently I am using the data from the project to investigate different ways of measuring and modeling growth in children's early lexical development.
email: rowemer@uchicago.edu
Alums
Laura Chang
Sarah Gripshover, Stanford University, sarahjg@stanford.edu
Kelsey Harden
Lauren King, Northwestern University, laurenking2009@u.northwestern.edu
Carrie Meanwell, Loyola University, carrie.meanwell@gmail.com
Seyda Ozcaliskan, University of Georgia, http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwpsy/faculty/ozcaliskan.htm , email: seyda@gsu.edu
Anjali Raja, University of Toronto, anjali.raja@utoronto.ca
Julia Rao
Meredith Simone, Midwestern University, massocial4@aol.com
Calla Trofatter, University of Chicago, lalaith@uchicago.edu
Kevin Uttich, University of California, Berkeley, uttich@calmail.berkeley.edu
