PhD student Andrea Sander-Montant and lab director Krista Byers-Heinlein, along with former honours student Rébecca Bissonnette, co-authored a study revealing that mothers have twice the impact on children’s language exposure compared to fathers. Andrea was featured on CTV News (interview starts at 18:27) and Global News. Both Andrea and Dr. Byers-Heinlein were also interviewed for Concordia News. (Read the full research paper here.)

PhD student Miranda Gómez Díaz was recognized by the Fonds de recherche du Québec for her exceptional graduate-level research on language acquisition in bilingual infants. Her paper, “Testing Theories of the Vocabulary Spurt With Monolingual and Bilingual Infants,” earned the September Prix Relève étoile Paul-Gérin-Lajoie. Read the Concordia News article about her achievement here.

Lab director Krista Byers-Heinlein was interviewed about bilingualism and shared insights from her research, which shows that children effectively learn two languages from birth and that mothers play a particularly influential role in language acquisition. Read the La Presse article here (in French).

Lab director Krista Byers-Heinlein discusses how babies are born being able to detect faces, and eyes are one of the first signals they learn to read. Read the Montreal Gazette article here.

In this episode, Sara Fernández Cuenca and Lauren Miller sit down with Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein, Professor of Developmental Psychology at Concordia University, who specializes in infant development with a focus on language acquisition. Dr. Byers-Heinlein talks about her personal experiences growing up bilingual in Canada, as well as raising a bilingual child in Montréal, the largest metropolitan French-speaking area in the province of Québec. They also discuss how bilingualism researchers are able to study infants long before they’re talking and why that research is important. Listen to the podcast here. 

Krista Byers-Heinlein discusses open science and mentoring in STEM as part of the "Research in Conversation in the Faculty of Arts and Science" series. Watch the presentation here. 

A new Concordia study by Esther Schott, Lena V. Kremin, and Krista Byers-Heinlein looking at children aged zero to nine reveals a large and diverse cohort varying along linguistic, urban–rural and geographic lines. Find the story here. 

Children start talking when they are around one year old. However, we know from research that they are already working on language before that. In this episode, we learn what exactly babies know about language. And we hear about the ingenious ways scientists have developed to figure this out. For example, they measure how fast babies suck on a fake teat, or measure the activity in their brains. Listen at Klets Heads.

Krista Byers-Heinlein of Concordia University discusses raising bilingual children at the Walrus Talks: Living Better series at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. Are bilingual babies confused by hearing 2 languages? Should parents stick to the one-parent-one-language approach? Watch this short talk to find out!

A new joint study by researchers at Concordia and Princeton Universities will investigate the language exposure of toddlers growing up in bilingual households. The study will use full-day recordings of what toddlers actually hear—for example, which languages they are exposed to, in what proportions, do parents mix two or more languages in the same sentence—and track children over two years, to see how this exposure might change over time and how it might influence development. Listen to Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein discuss this research and more on bilingualism as the main guest on Radio Noon Montreal. Find the interview here.

A new Concordia study shows that bilinguals hear sounds differently based on the language that they think they’re listening to. Co-author of the study Krista Byers-Heinlein joins Global’s Laura Casella to tell us what sounds are heard differently by a native English speaker versus a native French speaker. Find the interview here.

Different languages have different sounds- how do bilinguals navigate this? Dr. Byers-Heinlein talks about a study investigating how “bah” and “pah” sounds are interpreted depending on what language participants thought they were hearing. Find the interview here.

What does it mean to be bilingual? Can a newborn be bilingual? Is there an advantage to learning a language earlier? Does daily bilingual exposure affect children? What are good strategies to raise a bilingual or trilingual child? Does early bilingualism affect other skills? How do you know a baby is bilingual if they can’t speak yet? Does bilingualism influence how children think? Why do some people speak with an accent and others not? What kind of research do we see in the lab’s future? What does a typical day look like in a researcher’s life? Carine Monat-Reliat interviews Dr. Byers-Heinlein (interview from 16:30 to 33:35).

Sumeet Pal Singh interviews Dr. Byers-Heinlein on how kids make sense of a bilingual world. They discuss how she found 'an expectation' for one language within a single sentence, suggesting that kids efficiently parse information that helps them comprehend and learn multiple languages at the same time. Find the story here.

Princeton University News takes a look at a Dr. Byers-Heinlein, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, & Dr. Lew-William's new article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Find the story here.