The McGill Infant Development Centre (Kristine Onishi) explores language and cognitive development in young infants from newborns through 24-month-old infants. For example, we’re interested in finding out whether infants are born knowing that speech is special. By giving infants the opportunity to listen to speech and to non-speech sounds (for example, music), we can find out which aspects of speech are most interesting to infants. We're also interested in finding out what infants understand about events and people. Does a young infant pay attention to the difference between a cup on a block and block on a cup? Or to whether big sister prefers to play with the cup or the block? By showing infants different types of events, we can learn about what they notice about them.

The Infant Speech Perception Lab (Linda Polka) explores the development of speech perception during infancy. The goal of this work is to understand the initial abilities and biases that the infants bring to this task and how their speech processing changes with as they begin to understand and to produce spoken language. My lab is engaged in two overlapping lines of research; one focuses on the development of vowel perception and production during infancy and the other explores how language experience shapes infant perception of phonetic segments and processing of fluent connected speech in monolingual and bilingual infants. In current work we are also investigating the role of talker variability in adult and infant perception, including studies that explore how infants perceive speech produced by an infant talker.

The Communication Development and Disorders Lab (PoP Lab, Director: Aparna Nadig) observes how infants and children learn language and about the world around them. We are currently conducting two studies. In one  study we investigate how typically-developing infants aged 14 months learn about how objects work. Do they learn through social cues, such as a smile on the face of a person using the object, or rather through seeing how the object works multiple times? Questions like this are researched by showing short movies and measuring the amount of time the infants look at the movie, which is taken to reflect learning of the object's function. Our second study aims to better understand the social and perceptual strategies used to learn early words by both typically-developing infants aged 18 to 30 months and by preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. We are particularly interested in individual differences in vocabulary growth over time, and how this might be related to the ways children learn and generalize words. In the future, knowledge gained from this study may be used to help children with autism communicate better. 

The Talwar Child Development Team (Victoria Talwar) investigates children’s cognitive social development. Our research is informed by the disciplines of psychology, education and law to examine children’s behaviours that are pertinent to children’s adaptive development, child witness testimony and professionals who work with children. We conduct studies examining how children learn and develop different social behaviors such as honesty, politeness, regulation of their own emotions and understanding other’s feelings and beliefs. We look at child & youth social behaviour both in face-to-face interactions and also on-line. Studies include research on the developmental trajectories of children’s honesty and related behaviours and risk factors (e.g. their moral development, empathy, impulse control, parenting styles), children’s perceptions and evaluations of bullying behaviour (both traditional and cyber-bullying), youth and parents perceptions on on-line engagement and safety, and methods of promoting children’s accurate and truthful testimony.

Our research is funded by the Natural Science and Engineering Council (NSERC) of Canada, the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (CLLRN), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). All our projects receive approval from the McGill Research Ethics Board for Research on Human Subjects.