Tian Zhao
University of Washington, WA·Neuroscience
Between about 6 and 12 months of age, babies become better at hearing the speech sounds of their own language and worse at hearing sounds used only in other languages. How babies process speech during this "sensitive period" predicts their language skills years later.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
developmental language disorder
language acquisition
infant speech perception
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether infants with a family history of developmental language disorder show a longer sensitive period for speech learning than low-risk infants, by comparing brain responses at about 6, 12 and 14 months.
- Measure higher-level speech-sound discrimination using the mismatch response, a brain signal triggered by a change in sound, recorded with magnetoencephalography in high- and low-risk infants.
- Measure lower-level sound encoding with the complex auditory brainstem response, recorded at the same time with MEG, and test how it links to higher-level speech processing in infants.
More about the research
Earlier work by this researcher showed that brain responses to speech in this window predict grammar skills at age 6 and the risk of speech and language disorders. It is not yet known whether this period already looks different in babies at high risk for developmental language disorder (DLD), a common condition that makes learning language hard.
Why it matters
Developmental language disorder is often not recognized until children are older. Finding brain-based signs of DLD risk in the first year of life could help identify infants who need support earlier and guide targeted early interventions for children with a family history of communication disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Fernando Llanos Lucas
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Compare how speakers of languages with simpler versus more complex sound systems perceive key speech features, using auditory perception tasks.
Nan Ratner
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Identify the syntactic, vocabulary and spelling features that distinguish the writing of students with developmental language disorder (DLD) from typical peers across grades 6–11, by annotating the PERSUADE essay corpus utterance by utterance.
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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