Bilingual Word Learning: Is it easier for bilingual infants to learn banana/banane than apple/pomme?

Bilinguals learn two labels for the things in their environment. Sometimes, these labels sound similar across the two languages, e.g., banana and banane (“banana” in French), but often the labels sound different, e.g. apple and pomme (“apple” in French). Is it easier for bilingual infants to learn word pairs that sound similar across languages?

Fine-Tuning Language Discrimination: Do infants keep track of which language is spoken?

Bilingual infants often are raised who are bilingual themselves, who are mixing their languages when speaking to their child (“Do you want a pomme?”). I am interested in whether bilingual infants can detect when a single word is borrowed from another language, and whether infants can associate a speaker with the language being spoken.

Improving Research Methods for Studying Hard-to-Recruit Populations

Completing a study focusing on hard-to-recruit populations such as bilingual infants can take months to years. This increases the pressure to use participants efficiently. I wrote a paper on strategies for transparent data peeking and I am currently working on a paper on best practices for piloting developmental research questions.