Presenter: Jillian Weinman, Linguistics & Hearing and Speech Sciences, Global Public Health Scholars
For my practicum project, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Language Development and Perception Laboratories (LDEV) at the University of Maryland. I spent six hours each week during the semester coming into the lab to contact and schedule potential participants for studies, run participants in studies, help collect data for future analysis, code participant videos, and much more. The studies in LDEV focus on exploring language abilities of children to figure out how factors, such as noise, have an effect on how infants understand and develop language. The research done here could give parents a sense of behaviors that will most benefit their child’s language development, as well as inform educational systems how to identify delays in language abilities.
I really liked how in your research you included bilingual students and how they have an affect in your research when it comes to speech and noise development. But through that I began to wonder if you limited your research to a smaller portion of bilingual students. By that I mean if you only worked with children who spoke English and Spanish, or students who spoke the languages Chinese and English etc. And since your target was children, did you try to interact with students who are a part of ESOL programs at their schools, to see if speech/ noise development impacts them when they are trying to learn a new language? I also liked how you connected your research…
Connection to SDG 4 is critical. Your major in Hearing and Speech Sciences and your practicum in the lab demonstrates a clear pathway toward your career goal. Your images help show the story of the lab and your takeaway experience. This will be very inspiring to other students interested in linguistics and hearing and speech.
I really enjoyed your presentation and I like how you connected it to Sustainable Development Goal #4! With your research did you see big differences between adults and children? Also, do you think the same thing about background noise would apply to adults learning an additional language?