Professor Katherine Demuth | ARC Australian Laureate Fellow and Child Language Lab Director, Linguistics
How long have you been at a researcher at Macquarie?
Four years.
I was drawn to research because…
I’ve always been interested in science. But after a year as an undergrad working with mosquitoes and hamsters on a malaria research project in a lab with no windows, I decided to pursue my interests in language and people.
What would be an ‘elevator pitch’ of your research area?
My research looks at the processes underlying language acquisition in children. One can address this by looking at how children learn different languages (e.g English versus Mandarin), how they perform on experiments in the lab, or by examining what goes on in the brain when they listen to language. Thus, the study of language acquisition is at the interface of many different disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and even computational linguistics.
In layman’s terms, what is the wider impact of your research?
Much of our research provides a baseline for understanding how children’s language typically emerges. This is critical for providing insight into what goes wrong in children with language delay (also called Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and how this might be clinically addressed. It can also inform the design of more effective therapy for children with hearing loss, and can help identify problems that bilingual children learning English might face.
If I were given $1M in research funding, the first thing I would do is…
I have recently been awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship to pursue the above research for the next five years. This has enabled me to hire the personnel needed to carry out our research program in a more systematic and comprehensive fashion, focusing on a broad range of populations who experience various types of language delay.
Who is/was your biggest research mentor?
When I was 12 I read about Margaret Mead’s research on early childhood across cultures. This inspired me to carry out my PhD research in southern Africa, examining how children learn the languages there. Since coming to Australia I have been very fortunate to have become involved with various projects working on Aboriginal languages, and how these are being transmitted to the next generation, where issues of bilingualism and hearing loss can also play a role in children’s language development.
In ten years’ time, I see my research…
I have an active and growing Child Language Lab here at Macquarie, where we are examining many aspects of how children’s language develops, especially between the ages of 1 and 7. In 10 years time we will hopefully have a much better idea of what typical language acquisition looks like, and a better understanding of how to address different language problems when they appear. But to carry out this research we need lots of child participants, and parents and grandparents willing to bring them into our lab in the new Australian Hearing Hub. If you are interested, please send an email to ling.cll@mq.edu.au. You will get to see our wonderful new research facilities, and learn more about how your child learns language.