Bilingual Learning Lab

08/25/2026

Over the past couple of weeks, we have had the amazing opportunity to participate in two more local farmers’ markets! 🌻🥕

At the Brookline Farmers’ Market, our table was part of Inspo:Expo, a community event that brings together local organizations and community members to share resources, ideas, and opportunities to get involved. It was wonderful to be a part of this event and connect with so many families!

At the Belmont Farmers’ Market, we also enjoyed meeting families, discussing our research, and sharing more about current research participation opportunities. Thank you to CANDl lab members for your help at this event! Communication and Neurodevelopment Lab

Thank you to everyone who stopped by to chat, create art, and play language games! 🎨🗣️ We’re grateful for these opportunities to connect with our community!

belmontfarmersmarket

08/19/2026

🎉 A huge congratulations to Dr. Contino on her new position as Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida! 🎓✨

While we’re incredibly excited to see you take this next step in your career, we’re also going to miss having you in the lab!

Thank you, Dr. Contino, for all of your contributions, wisdom, support, and everything you’ve done to make our lab a better place. We’re so grateful for the time we’ve had with you and couldn’t be prouder of all you’ve accomplished.

Wishing you so much success in this exciting new chapter! We’ll miss you and are cheering you on every step of the way! ❤️

08/12/2026

We are excited to welcome new lab members! 🌟

1. Jasmine Sabol (she/her) is an undergraduate student studying Human Physiology at Sargent College. Her current research interests include the social and cognitive aspects of language acquisition and development. Outside of the lab, she enjoys walking, watching movies, and traveling. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in medicine and utilize the skills gained as a research assistant to work with diverse patient populations. 🧠🗣️

2. Milca Luna (she/her/hers) is an undergraduate student majoring in Biology with a Cell Biology, Molecular Biology & Genetics Specialization. 🔬Her current research interests include pediatric bilingual development and health equity with a focus on addressing the systemic factors that contribute to health disparities. 🌎 In her free time, Milca enjoys spending time with friends, embroidery, and seeing new films!

3. Josie Pappone is an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst, finishing up her degree this summer. She was connected to Boston University’s Bilingual Learning Lab through her previous lab affiliation at UMass. This previous lab experience has engendered her interest in exploring the interconnectedness of bilingualism, autism, and language acquisition. 🧩🗣️ After she earns her Bachelor’s in Speech, Language, and Hearing Science and Certificate in Spanish and Health from UMass, she plans to continue research and eventually continue education through a Master’s and/or a PhD program in the Boston area.

4. Selina Dai (she/her/hers) is a sophomore majoring in Psychology and Economics. As a bilingual speaker herself, she is particularly interested in cognitive flexibility and attention control in multilingual speakers. In her free time, Selina enjoys cooking, going to the gym, and watercolor painting. She is eager to contribute to research that bridges language, cognition, and culture. 🌎✨

08/05/2026

Excited to share our new paper in JSLHR!

When children hear a new word, they have to keep track of multiple possible word–object pairings before figuring out the correct match—a process called cross-situational word learning. We wanted to know whether children’s executive function skills help with this type of learning, and whether those relationships differ for children with developmental language disorder (DLD).

What did we find?
✨ Children who were better at monitoring and updating information as they learned were more successful at learning new words.
✨ Other executive function skills, like shifting attention and inhibiting responses, were not strong predictors in this task.
✨ Some of these relationships were similar across children with a range of language abilities, including children with DLD.

Why does this matter?

Our brains are constantly juggling information as we learn new words. 🧠📚

Learning new words isn’t just about language—it’s also about how children manage and update information in real time. Understanding which cognitive skills support vocabulary learning can help us build better theories of language development and may ultimately inform interventions that target the learning process itself.

We are grateful to everyone who made this work possible—our incredible child participants and families, collaborators, students, and the reviewers who helped strengthen the paper.

07/22/2026

We had such a great time at the Newton Farmers’ Market yesterday! 🥕🍓

Thank you to all of the families who stopped by our table to learn about local research participation opportunities. While families chatted with our team, children had fun playing language games and getting creative with arts and crafts! 🎨🧩

We’re grateful for everyone who visited us and look forward to seeing community members at the Brookline Farmers’ Market next Thursday, July 30th! 🌟

07/16/2026

We are incredibly excited to share our doctoral student, Malvika Khandelwal, successfully defended her Qualifying Project today! 🎉

Malvika’s project, Cross-Situational Word Learning in Context: The Relationship between Bilingualism and Semantic Density, examined the interactive effects of individual learner characteristics and semantic density on monolingual and bilingual children’s statistical learning. 🐻🛠️🧩

Thank you to her wonderful committee members for all their support and feedback! ✨

Congratulations to Malvika for achieving this milestone! 🎉

06/09/2026

📍Greetings from Madison, WI

Last weekend our doctoral student Anna Duncan and postdoctoral associate Kaityn Contino presented posters at the annual Symposium for Research in Child Language Disorders!

Anna’s project examined the effects of dual-language structure and language ability in children’s word learning, semantic feature learning, and listening comprehension. Her findings suggest that bilingual children can learn from both translation and code-switch contexts, but children with lower language skills may be particularly supported by code-switch language input. 📚

Dr. Contino’s poster examined the effects of bilingual experience and language ability on children’s novel word learning and production. She found that bilingual experience supports both receptive word learning and novel word production. 👧🏽🗣️

Both Anna and Kaityn also received the Student Travel Award (STAR)!

It was an incredible weekend filled with scientific research, exciting talks, and a fun visit to the farmer’s market. ✨

05/13/2026

🎉Are you curious about how your child learns languages?
🔎We are recruiting children ages 2-8 for our language research studies! We are inviting children who are monolingual or bilingual to participate.

🎁Families may receive up to a $100 in gift cards for participation! These studies can be completed online or in-person at Boston University.

💭Interested families can sign up at https://sites.bu.edu/crespolab/contact-us-2/contact-us/!

Participant Interest Form Interested in learning more about our studies? Want to participate? Fill out the form below and we will contact you! ¿Interesado en aprender más sobre nuestros estudios? ¿Quieres participar? ¡Rellena el formulario a continuación y nos pondremos en contacto contigo! 感...

05/07/2026

✨BLL END OF YEAR CELEBRATION✨

Yesterday the Bilingual Learning Lab members got together to recap the successful year we had. We got to celebrate everyone’s hard work and wonderful achievements. We also got to share heartfelt gratitude for our graduating students, who we will miss dearly. We wish them the best in all their future endeavors! 🎊🎓

Our work would not be possible without our amazing team! And so a huge thank you to them, as well as our wonderful participants! 🫂

04/29/2026

We are thrilled to share Estefanía passed her MS-SLP thesis defense 🎊👏🏼

Estefanía investigated the effects of dual-language input and language ability on word learning via bilingual storybooks. Her findings demonstrated that children are able to learn from code-switched input, and code-switching may support learning more than translated input, particularly for children with lower language skills. This highlights the need for more mixed-language resources for bilingual children. 👧🏽🧒🏻📚

Thank you to Estefanía‘s thesis committee members and the Bilingual Learning Lab for their support. ✨