This application requests support for an interdisciplinary predoctoral and postdoctoral training program in Language Processes, specifically emphasizing the link between child language acquisition and adult language comprehension and production. The project is housed in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The program includes eight training faculty who study a broad range of language comprehension, acquisition, and production processes. The program's motivation, beyond the basic fact that we have an exceptionally large and outstanding group of language faculty, is that we perceive important changes in language research that need to be addressed with a new kind of training. That is, language comprehension, production, and acquisition research has each traditionally been studied in isolation, but new progress in understanding the relationships between theses subfields is beginning to emerge. Training practices are lagging behind these new research efforts, however, and institutional barriers exist that limit the extent to which students are trained in both language acquisition and adult language performance. The highly cohesive group of training program faculty span these research areas and are committed to training the next generation of researchers in a way that emphasizes the growing connections between these fields. The goal is not to create scholars who will necessarily study both acquisition and processing but rather create researchers who consistently consider issues of both the child and adult state in their chosen area of research. Funds are requested to support four predoctoral and one postdoctoral trainees per year. Trainees will enter through the Department of Psychology and will have course requirements in other departments as well. Predoctoral trainees will fulfill all Departmental requirements for the Ph.D. and will in addition participate in activities specifically designed to foster integration of theory and research in acquisition and adult processing, as well as integration of research across typical and atypical populations. Postdoctoral trainees will receive training in areas of language research that are distinct from those that were the focus of their predoctoral work. Training will take place within one of the top-ranked U.S. Psychology Departments and at an institution with outstanding research facilities and resources,
| Mahr, Tristan; Edwards, Jan (2018) Using language input and lexical processing to predict vocabulary size. Dev Sci 21:e12685 |
| Gross, Megan; Kaushanskaya, Margarita (2018) Contributions of nonlinguistic task-shifting to language control in bilingual children. Biling (Camb Engl) 21:181-194 |
| Pomper, Ron; Saffran, Jenny R (2018) Familiar Object Salience Affects Novel Word Learning. Child Dev : |
| Kaushanskaya, Margarita; Gross, Megan; Sheena, Enanna et al. (2017) Novel Morpheme Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 26:301-315 |
| Law 2nd, Franzo; Mahr, Tristan; Schneeberg, Alissa et al. (2017) Vocabulary size and auditory word recognition in preschool children. Appl Psycholinguist 38:89-125 |
| McMillan, Brianna T M; Saffran, Jenny R (2016) Learning in Complex Environments: The Effects of Background Speech on Early Word Learning. Child Dev 87:1841-1855 |
| Gangopadhyay, Ishanti; Davidson, Meghan M; Ellis Weismer, Susan et al. (2016) The role of nonverbal working memory in morphosyntactic processing by school-aged monolingual and bilingual children. J Exp Child Psychol 142:171-94 |
| Mahr, Tristan; McMillan, Brianna T M; Saffran, Jenny R et al. (2015) Anticipatory coarticulation facilitates word recognition in toddlers. Cognition 142:345-50 |
| Gross, Megan; Kaushanskaya, Margarita (2015) Voluntary language switching in English-Spanish bilingual children. J Cogn Psychol (Hove) 27:992-1013 |
| Law 2nd, Franzo; Edwards, Jan R (2015) Effects of Vocabulary Size on Online Lexical Processing by Preschoolers. Lang Learn Dev 11:331-355 |
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