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Department of Psychology Ph: (619) 594-5358 Life Sciences 110
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Department of Psychology The Child Language and Emotion Lab Research Interests Dr. Friend's research focuses on the relation between language, cognition, and emotion. The relation between these developing systems, increasingly recognized in the scholarly literature, is addressed under the general rubric of communicative development. Three questions addressed by this research are described below. What matters most to children, what you say or how you say it? This research tests developmental mechanisms to account for a striking finding a shift in late infancy from emotion-based to language-based meaning and a subsequent integration of these sources of meaning in late childhood. What infants know about language before they begin speaking How do we know? This research explores different techniques for assessing infants' earliest language comprehension. The focus is on how well these early measures predict later development and on the utility of adaptations of these measures to other languages (e.g., Mexican-Spanish). What is the relation between parent reports and experimental assessments of infant language comprehension? This research evaluates the utility of parental report in estimating and predicting child language development. It focuses both on the strategies that parents use to estimate their children's language acquisition and the relation between parent estimations and child performance in the laboratory. A potential application of this research is the early identification of children with language delay. Students are involved in all phases of research in the laboratory and numerous opportunities exist to acquire specialized research skills such as FACS (Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System), computerized video coding, speech analysis and synthesis, and verbal transcript coding and analysis.
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© 2004 SDSU Department of Psychology - All Rights Reserved |
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