Child language acquisition

The Child Language Acquisition Group of the Center for Language and Brain studies first-language acquisition of kids both in monolingual and bilingual environment as well as language development in children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as Developmental Language Disorder / Specific Language Impairment, Autism Spectrum Disorders, and developmental dyslexia.

We do research with different age-group children: 6-to-12-month-old babies, 2-to-6-year-old children, first-grades pupils, 13-to-17-year-old adolescents. We use behavioral methods, eye-tracking, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). We also collect and process the video materials for language acquisition corpus CHILDES.

Our Group develops the standardized tests for language assessment in children. Also, we work on the methods of speech theraphy and share our experience.

If you want to participate in our experiments, please contact us (alopukhina@hse.ru, Dr. Anastasia Lopukhina).

Current projects

Child language corpora CHILDES

Acquisition of the Russian case system by monolinguals and bilinguals
The Acquisition of Ergativity in Georgian

The impact of phonological and orthographic processing on reading development in Russian children

Language profile of Russian primary-school-aged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Neurophysiological mechanisms of auditory processing in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An MEG study
The role of white-matter tracts in language processing and auditory perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Diffusion Tensor Imaging data

Applied research

RuCLAB (Russian Child Language Assessment Battery)
Russian phonological test battery for the assesment of language development
Good-enough language processing: the impact of age and noise

Completed projects

Assessing the Validity of the Standardized Assessment of Reading Skills in Russian and Verifying the Relevance of Available Normative Data
The influence of phonological neighborhood density on word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old children