Home > Events > Dev Sci Colloquium: Adriana Weisleder (Northwestern)
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Dev Sci Colloquium: Adriana Weisleder (Northwestern)

Time: 
Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - 12:15 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
https://umd.zoom.us/j/97438762602?pwd=bU1EaVFJcHJNeThhQ1V2U0VSdXRkUT09

 

Does Talking to Children Matter? A New Look at Past Work

Abstract: Research on early language development has been dominated by studies of children from white, middle-class, monolingual families in western countries. There is growing awareness about the importance of increasing participant diversity in our studies, but the broadening of participant demographics is not always accompanied by a broadening of the methods and theoretical frameworks used to understand language development in diverse contexts. This combination – the inclusion of participants from non-dominant backgrounds in studies that use methods and perspectives developed for and by people from dominant backgrounds – can result in research that problematizes the language practices of minoritized children and families, with important societal implications. In this talk, I use examples from my own work to illustrate and further interrogate this issue. Specifically, I revisit work published by Weisleder & Fernald in a 2013 paper titled “Talking to children matters”, which examined links between language experience, language processing efficiency and vocabulary development among children from Spanish-speaking immigrant families in the United States. I analyze the study’s methods and interpretive frameworks and argue that, although the study made efforts to reduce potential cultural biases in measuring the language environments and abilities of Spanish-speaking children, it nevertheless fell short of adopting a strengths-based approach. I then give examples from newer research that builds on this work while taking a perspective that more intentionally incorporates frameworks from cultural and minority psychology. Finally, I discuss implications of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between language input and language development in children whose experiences differ from those of the dominant culture in the United States.

Bio: Adriana Weisleder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University, where she directs the Child Language Lab. Dr. Weisleder received a PhD in Psychology from Stanford University and was a T32 postdoctoral fellow in pediatric primary care research at New York University School of Medicine. Her work seeks to understand patterns of typical and atypical language development in young children, with a focus on children who are dual language learners.  She uses multiple methodologies – including eye-tracking experiments, naturalistic observation, and clinical trials of interventions – to understand both the learning mechanisms and contexts that support language development. An important goal of her lab is to inform approaches for reducing inequities in children’s developmental and educational outcomes. She is a proud Costa Rican and Spanish-English bilingual.