Melanie Soderstrom

Biographic Data

ID827267
NAMEMelanie Soderstrom
GIVEN NAMESMelanie
FAMILY NAMESoderstrom
SIGNATURESODERSTROM M
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Manitoba
ORCID0000-0003-3212-5775
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS34
TOTAL CITATIONS2
AUTHOR COUNT34
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2007
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • Cross-Linguistic and Socioeconomic Differences in the Use of Variation Sets in Children’s Communicative Environments

    Open AccessCelia Renata Rosemberg, Florencia Alam et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2026

    This study examines variation sets (VS) – structured repetitions of words in different morphosyntactic contexts – in child-directed speech (CDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) across two communities (Argentinian Spanish and North American English) and socioeconomic groups. Drawing on naturalistic recordings from 101 families, results show that VS are more frequent in CDS than in ADS. In Argentinian Spanish, they are more prevalent in mid…

  • Impact of maternal depression on emotional development and communication from infancy to preschool years

    Open AccessMegan E Gornik, Isabelle M Hadley et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Review2026

  • Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study

    Open AccessMelanie Soderstrom, Joscelin Rocha‐hidalgo et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2025

    From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants’ preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI d…

  • A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences

    Open AccessJohn Bunce, Melanie Soderstrom et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2025

    We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2–36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting…

  • Evidence for Infant-directed Speech Preference Is Consistent Across Large-scale, Multi-site Replication and Meta-analysis

    Open AccessMartin Zettersten, Cameron Cox et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2024

    There is substantial evidence that infants prefer infant-directed speech (IDS) to adult-directed speech (ADS). The strongest evidence for this claim has come from two large-scale investigations: i) a community-augmented meta-analysis of published behavioral studies and ii) a large-scale multi-lab replication study. In this paper, we aim to improve our understanding of the IDS preference and its boundary conditions by combining and comparing these…

  • Establishing the reliability of metrics extracted from long-form recordings using Lena and the Aclew pipeline

    Open AccessAlejandrina Cristia, Lucas Gautheron et al.ARTICLEBehavior Research Methods2024

    Long-form audio recordings are increasingly used to study individual variation, group differences, and many other topics in theoretical and applied fields of developmental science, particularly for the description of children's language input (typically speech from adults) and children's language output (ranging from babble to sentences). The proprietary LENA software has been available for over a decade, and with it, users have come to rely on d…

  • Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas: A new measure of English‐Spanish vocabulary for dual language learners

    Open AccessCatherine S Tamis‐lemonda, George Kachergis et al.ARTICLEInfancy2024

    The valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual‐language‐learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed the Dual Language Learners English‐Spanish (DLL‐ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S. English‐Spanish DLLs. The inventories provide translation equivalents for all Spanish and English items on Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) short forms; extended inventories based on CDI long forms; and Spanish la…

  • A unified approach to demographic data collection for research with young children across diverse cultures

    Open AccessLachham Singh, Mihaela D Barokova et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2024Cited by: 2References: 20

    Culture is a key determinant of children's development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants' demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no stand…

  • Family Factors Associated with Hands-On Play and Screen Time During the Covid-19 Pandemic

    Open AccessShaelyn Stienwandt, Emily E Cameron et al.ARTICLEChild & Youth Care Forum2022

  • Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents

    Elika Bergelson, Melanie Soderstrom et al.PREPRINT2022

    Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival1,2. And yet, language is variable across individuals. Behavioral and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status3, children’s gender4, and multilingualism5. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here we leverage speech tech…

  • Building Emotional Awareness and Mental Health (Beam): A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of an App-Based Program for Mothers of Toddlers

    Open AccessAnna L MacKinnon, Kaeley M Simpson et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Psychiatry2022

    [www.ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT04772677]

  • Analysis of children’s everyday language experiences using longform audio: Promises and pitfalls ( Análisis de las experiencias lingüísticas cotidianas de niños y niñas utilizando audio de formato lar…

    Melanie SoderstromARTICLEJournal for the Study of…2021

    Emerging audio technologies over the last decade have provided a new, unprecedented window into the everyday lives of infants and young children. These new approaches will allow us to begin to address longstanding questions about the nature of language experiences across languages, communities and situations and the role of these experiences in language development across contexts. Here, I discuss the primary technology, LENA®, as well as more re…

  • A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants: Exploring the Preference for Infant-Directed Speech

    Open AccessKrista Byers-Heinlein, Angeline Sin Mei Tsui et al.ARTICLEAdvances in Methods and Practices…2021

    From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the …

  • The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi‐laboratory study

    Open AccessKrista Byers-Heinlein, Rachel Ka Ying Tsui et al.ARTICLEInfancy2021

    Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non‐verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always …

  • Prosody in Infant- and Child-Directed Speech

    Melanie Soderstrom, Heather Bortfeld et al.CHAPTEROxford Handbook of Language Prosody2020

    This chapter covers theoretical frameworks and experimental findings showing that young infants are sensitive to language prosody prenatally and can use it to learn about the lexical and morphosyntactic features of their native language(s). Specifically, the chapter first summarizes how prosody relates to the lexicon and the grammar in different languages. It then reviews empirical evidence about prosodic perception in infants. Subsequently, it s…

  • Perception of sibilant–liquid phonotactic frequency in full-term and preterm infants

    Open AccessBrenna Henrikson, Amanda Seidl et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2020

    We examined full-term and preterm infants’ perception of frequent and infrequent phonotactic pairings involving sibilants and liquids. Infants were tested on their preference for syllables with onsets involving /s/ or /ʃ/ followed by /l/ or /r/ using the Headturn Preference Procedure. Full-term infants preferred the frequent to the infrequent phonotactic pairings at 9 months, but not at either younger or older ages. Evidence was inconclusive rega…

  • A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

    Krista Byers-Heinlein, Angeline Tsui et al.PREPRINT2020

    From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the …

  • Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference

    Open AccessMichael C Frank, Katie Alcock et al.ARTICLEAdvances in Methods and Practices…2020

    Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) as…

  • A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system

    Open AccessAlejandrina Cristia, Marvin Lavechin et al.ARTICLEBehavior Research Methods2020

  • Longform recordings of everyday life: Ethics for best practices

    Open AccessMargaret Cychosz, Rachel Romeo et al.ARTICLEBehavior Research Methods2020

  • Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered recordings in various language environments using language-independent syllabification of speech

    Okko Räsänen, Shreyas Seshadri et al.PREPRINT2019

    Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are substan…

  • A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lenatm) system

    Alejandrina Cristia, Marvin Lavechin et al.PREPRINT2019

    In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA^®^ system, which aims to assess children's language environment. While the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts, on only some of its key characteristics. H…

  • Segmentability Differences Between Child-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech: A Systematic Test With an Ecologically Valid Corpus

    Open AccessAlejandrina Cristia, Emmanuel Dupoux et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2019

    Previous computational modeling suggests it is much easier to segment words from child-directed speech (CDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). However, this conclusion is based on data collected in the laboratory, with CDS from play sessions and ADS between a parent and an experimenter, which may not be representative of ecologically collected CDS and ADS. Fully naturalistic ADS and CDS collected with a nonintrusive recording device as the child …

  • Was that my name? Infants’ listening in conversational multi-talker backgrounds

    Open AccessDana E BERNIER, Melanie SoderstromARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    This study tested infants’ ability to segregate target speech from a background of ecologically valid multi-talker speech at a 10 dB SNR. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure, 72 English-learning 5-, 9-, and 12-month-old monolinguals were tested on their ability to detect and perceive their own name. At all three ages infants were able to detect the presence of the target speech, but only at 9 months did they show sensitivity to the phonetic d…

  • Influences of number of adults and adult: Child ratios on the quantity of adult language input across childcare settings

    Open AccessMelanie Soderstrom, Elizabeth Grauer et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2018

    New approaches to examining the language environment are putting greater emphasis on the use of highly naturalistic audio recordings and questions about cross-cultural differences in children’s real-world language experiences. These new approaches and questions require careful examination of different kinds of variables that may influence children’s language experiences. The current study examines the influence of the number of adults and adult:c…