•  CSD Home
•  About the Department
•  Events
•  Undergraduate Program
•  Graduate Program
•  Alumni and Friends
•  Our Faculty and Staff
•  Research
•  Speech and Hearing Ctr
•  Forms
•  Contact Us

Current Projects

Parents and prospective lab affiliates: if you are interested in participating in any of the following studies or would like to earn research experience by joining the lab, please email li.sheng@mail.utexas.edu or call 512-232-0739.

Vocabulary Organization in Children

We are conducting a study to investigate how children organize the words in their vocabulary. We are interested in children’s use of two organizational cues: 1) overlap in meaning between words (e.g., elephants and giraffes are both animals), and 2) overlap in sounds between words (e.g., cat and hat sound similar to each other).

We are looking for children whose language is developing on schedule and children who have a language learning disorder. We hope to distinguish the learning differences between groups of children by comparing performance in regard to different cue types.

Subject recruitment is ongoing. Children who are monolingual speakers of English between the ages of 5 to 10 years are invited to participate.

Vocabulary Development in Mandarin-English Bilingual Children

We are conducting a study to investigate vocabulary development in children who learn Mandarin Chinese from birth and begin systematic exposure to English between 18 months and 5 years of age. We have three goals: 1) to develop a Mandarin-Chinese vocabulary assessment tool for children who are raised in a bilingual environment; 2) to examine children’s knowledge of compound words (e.g., bookshelf/书架，chocolate cake/巧克力蛋糕) in English and in Mandarin; and 3) to study the process of novel word learning in a bilingual child’s first and second language.

Subject recruitment is ongoing. Mandarin-English bilingual children between the ages of 3 and 8 years are invited to participate.