By Nicole North

During the XXIV International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) 2024 Convergence held in Glasgow, Scotland on July 8th to 11th, SFU Linguistics professor Henny Yeung presented a poster that he co-authored with Fenqi Wang, Andrew Cheng, Farzana Ali, and Antonius Tam. 

The International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) is a not-for-profit organization devoted to the dissemination of research on the development of infants. They host this biennial conference so that researchers and practitioners can gather and discuss the latest research and theory in infant development. 

The title of the poster is An investigation of infant- and adult-directed speech in a second language. The research revealed the finding that bilingual parents may use both their languages to talk to infants, but in daylong recordings this L1–L2 balance is not correlated with adult-directed L1–L2 use and not easily predicted by questionnaires. Refer to the image of the poster below, which contains detailed information about the research methods and findings. 

The research was conducted by the Language Learning and Development Lab (LangDev Lab), an SFU Linguistics lab where Yeung serves as Director.