Lab Director
Melanie Soderstrom, Professor
Dr. Soderstrom has been doing research and teaching in infant speech perception and early grammatical development for more than fifteen years. She came to the University of Manitoba in 2008 from a research position at Brown University. Beginning July 2023, she will also serve as the Head of the Department of Psychology.
Graduate Students
Sana Fekrazad
Sana is a Ph.D. student in the U of M Developmental Psychology program. She joined the lab in Fall 2023. Her thesis focuses on infants’ familiarity and novelty preferences, and caregivers’ infant-directed speech.
Sara Montazeri
Sara is a Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology, currently in the sixth year of her program. Her research focuses on Persian infant-directed speech, and she will continue writing her dissertation this summer, with plans to defend in the fall.
Megan Gornik
Megan is a Ph.D. student in the U of M Clinical Psychology program. Her thesis focuses on the impact of maternal depression and anxiety on mother-infant interactions. She first joined the lab as a research assistant in 2018.
Isabelle Hadley
Isabelle is in her first year of the School Psychology Master’s program. She will soon start recruiting infants in the 8–12-month age range for her master’s study on maternal stress and infant development.
Lab Coordinator
Erica Pouteau
Erica graduated from the University of Manitoba with her BSc. Honours Degree in Microbiology in June 2024. Erica has research experience in the MicroStats lab in the Dept. of Microbiology. Erica joined the lab to advance her understanding and experiences working in psychology, as she is interested in a career in Genetic Counselling.
Research Assistants
Rebeca Urizar
Rebeca joined the lab in November 2022. Rebeca completed her Undergraduate Thesis work in Spring 2025. This upcoming fall she will begin her graduate studies in Developmental Psychology. Rebeca is currently testing babies’ IDS preference and training research assistants.
Maia Kullman
coming soon
Katerina Porteous
Coming Soon
Feyisayo Dosumu
Feyisayo is going into her fourth year in the Faculty of Science as an undergraduate psychology student, and will begin her honor’s thesis in Fall 2025. In the lab, she continues to work on our Maternal Anxiety project and Cochlear project as a research assistant.
Edidiong Akpan
Coming soon!
Marlea Sabo
Marlea will be starting her honours thesis this upcoming fall. In the meantime, she received a PURE summer research award and is working with Isabelle to get her masters project up and running. She also continues to work on Megan’s Maternal Anxiety PhD project.
Rose Gumber
Rose is going into her fourth year as an Honours Psychology student and will be beginning her thesis project this fall. As a research assistant, she is currently supporting Megan’s PhD research on maternal mental health and early language development.
Cailin Douglas
Coming Soon
Volunteers
More information coming soon!
Recent Alumni
Ludivine Glas
Ludivine joined the lab in January 2021 as postdoctoral researcher, after a teaching and research assistant position at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis (France). She has PhD in language science at the University of Lyon 2 and studied biology and ethology at Montpellier 2 and Rennes 1 university for her undergraduate and graduate studies. She is interested in language development, especially early words acquisition, children everyday environment and methods to measure early vocabulary production and context.
Cindy Le
Cindy joined the lab in the beginning of 2020 as a research assistant and has completed her Honours thesis with Dr. Soderstrom as her advisor. Her interests include Developmental Psychology and Linguistics. Since completing her undergraduate degree, she began her master’s in Speech Language Pathology.
Chloe Walker
Chloe joined the lab in February 2023 and is working on her B.A. Honours in Psychology and Linguistics.
Yejin Cha
Yejin joined the lab in November 2022. Yejin is pursuing a B.A. Honours in Psychology and will be starting her thesis with Dr. Soderstrom as her advisor.
Grace Zhou
Grace joined the lab in Fall 2021 and split her time between being the office assistant for ManyBabies, and the perceptual studies Lab Coordinator. She completed her B.A. in Psychology and Anthropology at McGill University and hopes to continue her education by pursuing a master’s in Clinical or Counselling Psychology.
Cara Allardice
Cara joined the lab in fall 2021. is currently in the final year of her B.A. (Honours) in Psychology. She completed her last year of B.A. Honours degree in Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Soderstrom. She also recently received the NSERC grant which will be used to help her to pursue her Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology at Lakehead University beginning in the fall of 2023.
Kiana Chubey
Kiana joined the lab in the summer of 2019 as a research assistant. She completed her last year of B.A. Honours degree in Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Soderstrom. In fall 2023, she will be continuing her education in the University of Alberta’s School and Clinical Child Psychology Masters program.
Trevor Sie
Trevor joined the lab in the summer of 2017 shortly after being accepted into the master’s of linguistics program here at U of M. Previously he completed undergraduate degrees in both psychology and linguistics (U of M). He is interested in cognitive linguistics and more specifically grammar measured in a multimodal context, i.e. grammar measured by gesture in addition to speech. Additionally, he worked on the ACLEW project here in the lab.
Karmen McDivitt
Karmen joined the lab in the Fall of 2014 after completing her Bachelor of Arts-Honours degree in Psychology at the University of British Colombia-Okanagan. She completed her Master of Arts degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Manitoba, under the supervision of Dr. Melanie Soderstrom, in the Baby Language Lab. She also completed her Ph.D. in the University of Manitoba Clinical Psychology program. Her dissertation work in the lab examined the language environments of infants born to young Winnipeg mothers.
Madison Hardman
Madison received her Honours Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto and has been conducting psychology research at the University of Manitoba since 2019. Her research focuses on mental health during the perinatal period, in addition to mental health information evaluation and information needs. In Fall 2022, she started her master’s in Clinical Psychology at the University of Manitoba.
Mercedes Casar
Mercedes joined the Baby Language Lab in 2016 and completed her B. A. Honours in Psychology. She is currently working on her Master’s in Developmental Psychology examining how smartphone use impacts the amount of language mothers use when their infants are present.
Sarah Ajao
Sarah joined the lab in Fall 2019 and has completed her BSc. degree in Psychology. Fiercely passionate about all things kids, she works and volunteers with kids and families of all backgrounds, in various capacities. Sarah is fascinated by the cognitive development of children and the way they learn to interact and appreciate the world around them while attaining speech. She plans to further her education in the field and pursue a child-centered career.
John Bunce
John joined the lab as a postdoctoral researcher in the fall of 2017 shortly after completing his PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of California, Merced. His undergraduate studies were in psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is broadly interested in language development, especially how infants learn the meanings of words. During his time in the lab, he worked on several projects exploring children’s natural language environments, and is a major contributor to the ACLEW project. He is currently an Assistant Professor at California State University, East Bay.
Sarah MacEwan
Sarah joined the lab in Summer 2017. After completing her undergraduate degree in cognitive science at Mount Allison University in spring 2019, she returned to the lab as a summer research student. In September 2019, she was hired full-time as the lab coordinator. In Fall 2020, Sarah began her master’s of Audiology at the University of British Colombia.
Abby Wilcoxson
Abby has recently finished her Honours degree in Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Soderstrom, which explored music and language development in children.
Reagan Campbell
Reagan joined the lab in 2019 as a research assistant. She is currently working on her B.A. in Psychology. Upon completion of her bachelor’s degree, she plans on attending graduate school for speech-language pathology.
Kelsey Dyck
Kelsey completed her B.A. in Linguistics. Her involvement in the lab included the reception of the Undergraduate Research Award in the lab examining infants’ preferences for infant-directed speech (the ManyBabies project). Upon completing her bachelor’s degree, she was accepted to graduate school for speech-language pathology.
Brenna Henrikson
Brenna joined the lab in September 2015 and completed her Master’s with the Baby Language Lab in 2017 with her work on infant speech perception in preterm infants. She is now completing a PhD in Clinical Psychology here at U of M.