Lab Staff
Lab Director
Melanie Soderstrom, Assistant Professor
Dr. Soderstrom has been doing research and teaching in infant speech perception and early grammatical development for more than ten years. She came to the University of Manitoba in 2008 from a research position at Brown University. She teaches Child Development, as well as upper level courses on development, language acquisition, and related topics.
Graduate Students
Dana Bernier
Dana graduated from the University of Manitoba in Spring 2010 with an honours project in the lab. She is now a graduate student in the lab, working on the effects of noise on infants' perception of speech sounds.
Melissa Reimchen
Melissa Reimchen recently graduated from the University of Lethbridge with a BA in psychology. She will be joining the lab as a graduate student in the Fall 2011. Melissa has interests in music and language perception in adults and infants.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Kelsey Wittebolle
Kelsey is in her second year with the lab, and graduated with honours this year. She is doing some follow-up work on her honours thesis this summer 2011, looking at the relationship between activity and the language environment.
Alexis Kozak
Alexis is in her second year with the lab, and graduated with honours this year. She is doing some follow-up work on her honours thesis this summer 2011, looking at infants' perception of their father's voice.
Lindsay Bacala
Lindsay is in her second year with the lab, and will be starting her honours project this summer, looking at whether familiar syllables like "-ing" help infants to detect words in speech. She has been the lab perceptual research co-ordinator since Fall 2010.
Lab Alumni
Melissa Wong
Melissa Wong recently graduated from UBC with a BA in psychology. She joined the lab as a graduate student in the Fall 2009. She plans to defend her Master's thesis on syntactic dependencies in June 2011.
Joanna Bhaskaran
Joanna is in her third year with the lab, and graduated with honours this year. She received a summer research scholarship and will be pursuing a follow-up to her honours thesis this summer 2011. She will be starting the graduate clinical program here at UofM in the fall.
Recent Collaborators
Eon-Suk Ko
Dr. Eon-Suk Ko is a linguist specializing in phonology, phonetics, child language acquisition and corpus linguistics. Her recent research in language acquisition includes the perception and production of language-specific phonotatic patterns and the developmental aspects of prosody in mother-child speech. Dr. Ko is at SUNY Buffalo.
Barbara Höhle
Dr. Höhle is a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Potsdam in Germany. She is currently collaborating with our lab in comparing how infants across different language environments acquire the grammar of their language.
James Morgan
Dr. James Morgan is a reknowned researcher in infant speech perception. He is especially well known for his early work in formal models of acquisition, and later work in many topics in infant speech perception, including phonological bootstrapping, phoneme perception, statistical learning, and perception of infant-directed speech. He was Dr. Soderstrom's mentor during her postdoctoral years at Brown University.
Erin Conwell
Dr. Erin Conwell is an Assistant Professor at North Dakota State University. Her research is in early child grammar acquisition and other aspects of early language development and infant speech perception.
Katherine White
Dr. Katherine White completed her BA in Psychology and French from Cornell University before completing her PhD in Cognitive Science at Brown University. Her research includes Infant speech perception, phonological development, lexical representation and spoken word recognition. Dr. White is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.
Megan Blossom
Megan Blossom worked for two years as a research assistant at the Metcalf Infant Research Lab at Brown University. She completed her undergraduate degree at Brown in 2005 with a major in cognitive neuroscience. After a couple of years of research experience Megan headed off to graduate school. She is currently in the Child Language Doctoral Program at the University of Kansas.