Children pick up a lot more than just words as they learn how to speak - they tune into accents, tone and social cues from an early age. How do the languages they hear at home or in their communities shape their learning?
Children pick up a lot more than just words as they learn how to speak - they tune into accents, tone and social cues from an early age. How do the languages they hear at home or in their communities shape their learning?
Join us for a fascinating talk by Professor Elizabeth Johnson on how children learn to communicate in linguistically diverse environments. Drawing on insights from developmental psychology, linguistics, and speech sciences, explore how kids not only process sounds and words but also develop an awareness of the social aspects of speech, from accents to tone and gender.
Be part of the conversation at this follow-up event to the story featured in University of Toronto Magazine’s January digital issue.
Register now to tune into the livestream and receive the post-event recording.
Speaker
Elizabeth Johnson
Dr. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and the Director of the UTM Child Language and Speech Studies Lab (C.L.A.S.S. Lab). In 2012, Johnson was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Spoken Language Acquisition. Her main line of research is focused on understanding how children acquire their native language(s). A sampling of topics recently under study in her lab include the development of spoken word recognition, how infants learn to cope with connected speech processes and segment words from speech, audio-visual speech perception, infant multilingualism, accent and dialect perception, the development of word-learning heuristics, experiential effects on voice recognition, the link between early perception and production, and the acquisition of language-specific prosody.
Dr. Johnson received her BA from the University of Rochester, where she majored in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and completed a Take Five program in Developmental Biology & Evolution. She earned her MA in Psychology and her PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University.
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