Research in our lab is approved by the Research Ethics Board of the University of Manitoba. We are grateful for funding from SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council), and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Council), as well as internal funding from the University of Manitoba.
In Lab Studies – Preference Studies
Preference for Infant-directed Speech: How are infants’ preferences for the special properties of child-directed speech different across cultures and languages? (6 – 12 month olds)
We speak very differently to babies than we do to other adults — but this style of speaking varies across cultures and languages. Together with several laboratories in Europe we are examining how infants preference for this style of speech varies in different circumstances, languages and infant age.
Caregiver IDS and Infants’ preferences for novelty and familiarity (3 – 15 months)
Doctoral student, Sana Fekrazad, is examining how caregivers use infant-directed speech (IDS) and support infants’ exploration during play with familiar and novel toys. Her study, part of the large-scale ManyBabies5 (MB5) project, will explore how caregivers’ speech and behaviors differ between novel versus familiar objects, and how these interactions relate to infants’ preferences for novelty and familiarity. By combining video/audio recordings, experimental data, and caregiver-report questionnaires, her research bridges naturalistic play and structured tasks to better understand how caregiver communication—especially IDS—shapes early cognitive and language development.
In Lab – Observational & Questionnaire-Based Studies
Maternal Mental Health and Language (Maternal Caregivers and their child aged 3-6 years old).
For her doctoral dissertation, Megan Gornik is examining the impact of maternal anxiety and parenting stress on mother-preschooler interactions by analyzing aspects of their behaviour, speech, and expression of emotions. In her Masters work with mothers experiencing depression, she found relationships between the emotional expressions of mothers and their children (e.g. mothers who sounded happier had children who sounded happier). She is currently extending this work to examine the impact of maternal anxiety on these interactions. Data collection for this study is complete and Megan is expecting to complete her analyses and present her findings this fall.
The Impact of Maternal Stress on Infant Development (8-12 months old)
School Psychology Master’s student Isabelle Hadley’s study examines the effect of maternal experiences of stress on maternal communication, infant cognitive and language development. Mothers fill out a variety of surveys online (from home) and partake in joint-book and free play tasks once in-lab. These sessions are audio/videorecorded and coded for a variety of characteristics of the mother and infant behaviour. This combination of structured surveys and naturalistic tasks allows us to build an understanding the potential link between stress in the perinatal period and infant development. Data collection for this project is nearing completion and we hope to have some findings to report soon.
Home Recording Studies
Infant-directed speech in Farsi
Doctoral candidate Sara Montazeri is investigating the linguistic environment of Persian-learning infants in Iran, focusing on how caregivers communicate with infants in everyday settings. Using naturalistic recordings from dozens of Iranian families in Mashhad, her research has so far revealed that infants receive a significantly larger share of their overall language input from female speakers compared to male speakers, highlighting a strong gender imbalance in the caregiving environment. Additionally, her study finds that, similar to Western mothers, Persian mothers use significantly higher pitch, greater pitch variability, and longer utterances when addressing their infants compared to adults. Montazeri’s ongoing work with this rich data set offers important cross-cultural insights into how the linguistic environment and the acoustic features of Infant-Directed Speech shape early language development in non-Western contexts.