Social interactions and word learning in deaf children with cochlear implants by Derek Houston

Summary:
Children learn words in social contexts in which they and their caregivers interact and create moments of joint attention. Parent-child interactions are complex and multimodal, and differences in children’s sensory experiences may impact the quantity and quality of joint attention events. We investigate this possibility by conducting detailed analyses of interactions between deaf children with cochlear implants and their hearing parents during free play sessions with novel objects that were assigned nonword labels. During the sessions, parents and children wear head-mounted cameras and eye trackers, which allows us to gain rich information about the frequency and qualities of parent-child interactions from first-person perspectives. We are also able to assess the coordination of parent novel-object labeling with moments of joint attention. Data have been collected also from dyads with normal-hearing children. I will report between-group similarities and differences in social interactions and word labeling behaviors and discuss the possible implications of our findings for understanding how early auditory experience affects parent-child interactions and word learning.

Short biography:
Derek M. Houston, PhD, joined the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine July 2015. He received his doctorate in psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 2000.  His graduate training research focused on how normal hearing, typically developing infants segment words from fluent speech and recognize words across different talkers. After graduating, he moved to Indiana University School of Medicine and constructed the world’s first laboratory to investigate the speech perception and language skills of deaf infants who receive cochlear implants. Since then, his work has investigated the effects of early auditory deprivation and subsequent cochlear implantation on speech discrimination, attention to speech, sensitivity to language-specific properties of speech, word learning, and general cognitive skills in deaf infants and toddlers. His research in Columbus, OH represents a collaborative effort between OSU and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. His work is currently funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.