Wellesley College Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development

06/16/2023

We are reaching out to families to help with a new virtual study with the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development at Wellesley College. The principal investigator, Dr. Jennie Pyers, is a professor in the Psychology Department at Wellesley College. We hope that you’ll consider joining us!

We are currently looking for children ages 2-6 years old to play a short fun game with one of our researchers to help us understand how children’s perspective taking skills develop over time. In this study, we will first ask you to provide some basic demographic information about your child. We will then meet with you and your child via Zoom. During the Zoom session your child will hear some stories and respond to some questions about those stories. The zoom session should only take about 15 minutes. Your family will be compensated with a $5.00 Amazon gift card.

If you are interested in participating, you can click the link attached to this post to review our consent form and schedule a time to work with us. Or you can send us an email ([email protected]). We will send you the consent form for our study and get you set up for the online video appointment! Scheduling is very flexible, so we would be happy to find a time that works best for you and your family.

https://tinyurl.com/OnlineStudyLLCD

06/04/2021

Congrats to our Wellesley College seniors, Katherine Chan and Charlotte Emily Ryan! Wishing you all the best ❤️

05/21/2021

Congrats to Marglucy Omwega Class of '22 on winning the Camellia Student Leadership award for her role as a Community Inclusion Facilitator.

"The Inclusive Leadership Award recognizes a student or group of students who has demonstrated leadership through action that expands involvement and inclusion of peers across differences.

Recipients in this category ideally demonstrate an ability to build bridges across cultural, political, social, economic, or other barriers to cooperation and communication. Compelling nominees further demonstrate an ability to facilitate conversation in ways that create space for everyone’s voices to be heard.

We are pleased to present this award to the Community Inclusion Facilitators (CIFs), a group of peer leaders trained to lead workshops on social justice and identity-related issues. These students have demonstrated extraordinary leadership throughout this year, promoting inclusion across differences by facilitating difficult conversations among members of student organizations on topics such as privilege and oppression, and what it means to be an ally and accomplice in efforts toward social justice.

CIFs effectively create safe and brave spaces to have these difficult conversations through their compassion and active listening. Not only do they master teaching key concepts such as classism, racism, gender identity, sexual orientation, intersectionality, and more; they also make these concepts accessible by relating them to students’ daily experiences in a way that people will understand. As a result of these conversations, many student organizations have started to engage in transformative processes of becoming more inclusive, such as working to destigmatize receiving financial aid and making their activities more accessible to all students. Some organizations have even requested multiple workshops because they learned so much, and have been even more inspired by seeing their peers facilitate the workshops. As one nominator shared, “the CIFs compassion, dedication, and professionalism have ignited transformative processes for student groups to become more inclusive.”

Members: Lizette Mier ’22, Iris Li ’22, Devanshi Gupta ’21, Regina Gallardo ’23, Karen Alvarez Julian ’21, Ana Luisa McCullough ’22, Ann Xu ’22, Marglucy Omwega ’22, Kristi Spiru ’22, Jessica Flores-Olguin ’22, Lyanna Toh ’23, Teo Gariepy ’22, Julia Philippe-Auguste ’22, Jenna Hua ’22, Xafsa Aden ’22, Matilda Berke ’21

Welcome to the 2021 Camellia Student Leadership Awards webpage. Congratulations to all of this year’s Camellia Award nominees and recipients!

05/21/2021

Congratulations to graduating senior Charlotte Emily Ryan for winning the Camellia Student Leadership Award for Community Partnership for her work leading Wellesley for Boston Children's Hospital.
"In a typical year you can find the 60 + members of Wellesley for Boston Children’s Hospital catching the commuter rail into Boston between classes to provide support for children and families receiving treatment in the hospital and staying at two family houses nearby. In March of 2020 as the world began to close down and “distance” became the norm, Wellesley for Boston Children’s Hospital found a way to stay connected. This group worked with hospital and family houses to understand their patients changing needs and the hospital’s changing protocols. In the fall of 2021, Wellesley for Boston Children’s Hospital, added an additional challenge of needing to also factor in Wellesley’s campus safety protocols. Throughout this unusual year, Wellesley for Boston Children’s Hospital created hundreds of “play bags” for children and families. They worked to make sure that each item was approved, sanitized, and packaged. They also worked to coordinate distribution of the bags from Wellesley to Boston. In a year when most volunteers stepped back, Wellesley for Boston Children’s Hospital stepped up and responded to the needs of their community partner while providing connection and community on campus."

Charlotte Ryan ’21, Co-President, and Kelly Hsu ’21, Co-President

Welcome to the 2021 Camellia Student Leadership Awards webpage. Congratulations to all of this year’s Camellia Award nominees and recipients!

05/20/2021

Today is the annual Ruhlman Conference, an opportunity for members of the Wellesley community to come together and celebrate student academic accomplishments across disciplines.

Our lab is excited to share two projects that we prepared for this year's Ruhlman Conference.

Presentation and Panel Discussion: "How Does Manipulating Experience Shape Preschool Children’s Gestural Representations of Novel Objects?"
Link: https://youtu.be/Xh1m2sjOKh0

Poster: "Virtually Investigating the Effect of Motor Experience on Children’s Gesture Production"
Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tdSqERSmD6x_rVLoc9YB0rdbHbgZ0-aU

For more information, you can find the full program at https://www.wellesley.edu/ruhlman.

The Ruhlman Conference is made possible by the Barbara Peterson Ruhlman Fund for Interdisciplinary Study. The conference is intended to foster collaboration among students and faculty across the disciplines and to enhance the intellectual life of the College. The event will provide an opportunity fo...

04/02/2021

Virtual research study on gesture use in children ages 3-5 years seeking participants. https://forms.gle/PpBdt1mCiSQrD1398
_______________________________________________________

The Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development at Wellesley College is currently seeking children ages 3-5 years to participate in a virtual research study to help us understand how children’s experiences shape their use of gestures.
In this study, we will first ask parents to complete an online survey providing some basic information, including your child’s experience with different household activities. We will then schedule a meeting via Zoom to see how your child gestures about each of these activities during a short game.

The survey should take no more than 10 minutes of your time, and the game should only take about 15 minutes.

Your family will be compensated with a $5.00 Amazon gift card.
Scheduling is very flexible, we would be happy to find a time that works for you and your family.

For more information, click the ‘Sign Up’ button below to fill out our interest form, https://forms.gle/PpBdt1mCiSQrD1398 or email us at [email protected].

Thank you so much for your interest in participating in research with the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development! Filling out this form allows our team to be able to contact you about potential research opportunities in which your child may participate. This form does not obligate you to....

02/23/2021

We're bursting with pride that our lab member, Marglucy Omwega, has been named a Ronald McNair Fellow! Congrats Marglucy from the entire team!

02/16/2021

Our lab's research was featured in the Association for Psychological Science's December 2020 edition of "The Observer". Check out the article for an overview of how language shapes cognition over the course of development.

Psychological scientists explore the myriad ways that language shapes how we understand and reason about the social minds of those around us.

02/13/2021

Virtual research study on gesture use in children ages 2-5 years seeking participants. https://forms.gle/PpBdt1mCiSQrD1398
_______________________________________________________

The Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development at Wellesley College is currently seeking children ages 2-5 years to participate in a virtual research study to help us understand how children’s experiences shape their use of gestures.

In this study, we will first ask parents to complete an online survey providing some basic information, including your child’s experience with different household activities. We will then schedule a meeting via Zoom to see how your child gestures about each of these activities during a short game.

The survey should take no more than 10 minutes of your time, and the game should only take about 15 minutes.
Your family will be compensated with a $5.00 Amazon gift card.
Scheduling is very flexible, we would be happy to find a time that works for you and your family.

For more information, click the ‘Sign Up’ button below to fill out our interest form, https://forms.gle/PpBdt1mCiSQrD1398 or email us at [email protected].

Thank you so much for your interest in participating in research with the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development! Filling out this form allows our team to be able to contact you about potential research opportunities in which your child may participate. This form does not obligate you to....

02/12/2021

Welcome to our page! We are the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Development (LLCD) at Wellesley College.

The LLCD investigates interactions between language and cognitive development across the lifespan. We work with typically developing children, deaf children and adults, bimodal bilinguals, and learners of an emerging sign language in Nicaragua to identify how the acquisition and use of a sign language is both shaped by and, in turn, shapes a learner’s cognitive abilities and how language delays affect cognitive development.

If you would like to learn more about our current studies, click the sign up button on our page or email us at [email protected].