Meg Cychosz

Meg Cychosz will speak at hte UC San Diego Linguistics Department on Monday, February 9 at 2:00 pm in AP&M 4301.

How children's variable input shapes phonological structure: Language learning where it happens

Children learn the patterns of their native language(s) through years spent interacting and observing in their everyday environments. Yet understanding how this learning unfolds in natural settings remains a significant challenge.
This talk investigates how children's variable input shapes phonological development using evidence from large-scale recordings of natural language environments. Drawing on a large cross-linguistic database of infant babbling, I demonstrate
how early vocal development follows remarkably similar trajectories despite dramatically different ambient language input. I then present findings from infants bilingually acquiring Quechua and Spanish in the Bolivian highlands, where differences in early language exposure shape infants' progression through babbling milestones. The talk concludes with recent work using
speech synthesis and signal processing to analyze how infants with cochlear implants develop speech in their everyday environments. Throughout, I showcase novel computational methods for collecting and analyzing naturalistic speech data outside traditional lab settings—techniques that bridge developmental research and linguistic fieldwork. This research reveals how children build robust phonological systems despite variable and sometimes degraded input conditions, with implications for phonological theory.