We have created a new blog and website to present our own research and other people’s cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research on child-directed speech (CDS) and its effects on children’s linguistic development: http://childdirectedspeech.wordpress.com/.
We will use this site to provide resources for researchers, parents, and language professionals like teachers or speech and language therapists (e.g. reading lists, fact sheets, etc.). Readers of our experimentalfieldlinguistics blog might be particularly interested in our list of readings about cross-cultural differences. Some of the studies that we list or discuss involve naturalistic data or semi-structured language games played in the family, but others involve systematic training studies that investigate effects of feedback or different types of models in the child’s input; e.g. work by Saxton, Waterfall, and others.
If you have any information about interesting studies, books, blog posts, fact sheets, or social media accounts, please let us know so that we can share the information. We also welcome suggestions for blog post topics, resource creation, etc. You can follow the blog directly on WordPress or follow us on Twitter @LanguageGames4a . The blog is associated with our new Ladeli Centre for Language Development throughout the Lifespan at the University of Essex, which has a strong cross-cultural and cross-linguistic focus and will carry out studies on under-researched languages.
In some of our projects on child-directed speech, we will use our new “Language in a bag” toolkit for the creation of language games
We hope you will find our resources useful and spread the word!
Sonja Eisenbeiss
Experimental Linguistics in the Field 