Priya Shimpi, a senior at Indiana University, has worked on a variety of projects with university scientists. Her work has included bilingual research with Raquel Anderson, research on cognitive development with Linda Smith, and investigations of infant communication with Michael Goldstein and Meredith West. Priya was a Program in Animal Behavior Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Intern in the Summer of 1998.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: In the summer following your freshman year, you researched language development in children from bilingual households with Raquel Anderson of I.U.'s Bilingual Research Laboratory. What did you discover?

PRIYA SHIMPI: Dr. Anderson was working on a longitudinal study of bilingual children's development in both English and Spanish. The study was concerned with examining how learning two languages at once effects later language use/proficiency in either language. Whereas I only saw a small part of Dr. Anderson's entire study, I read many articles in her laboratory, from which I learned that many educational systems have labeled bilingual children as "remedial" and that there is a widespread belief that growing up bilingual will hinder language development in both languages.

I also had the chance to participate in a session with Dr. Anderson's two young daughters. She had the two participate in videotaped "Play" sessions in English and in Spanish, in order to compare their language use in the two contexts. Dr. Anderson remarked that her older daughter had much more of a mastery of Spanish than the younger daughter, a comment echoed by others I have spoken to who have bilingual siblings or children. It is the social and linguistic contexts of the bilingual home environment that I would like to study, in order to determine what factors contribute to the differential linguistic development (if this is common) in bilingual siblings.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: You presently research what is called infant-directed speech. Could you briefly define this type of speech?

PRIYA SHIMPI: Infant-directed speech, also known as motherese, is the modified speech mothers use when addressing infants. As opposed to speech used with adults, motherese is higher in pitch, is slower, and has a more exaggerated prosody. Many have speculated on the role of infant-directed speech in facilitating language development. What has been determined is that infants prefer infant-directed speech to adult-directed speech, in terms of displaying more time looking at the speech source. This result is what we are trying to conclude from the Adult Speech and Infant Attention (ASIA) study that is in the coding stages in our Baby Lab at Indiana University.

Studies have found that ID speech is nearly universal. However, through my Honors Thesis, I would like to show that mothers are not the only ones who can capture and maintain infant attention through the use of modified speech.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: What are some of the limitations on the study of infant-directed speech?

PRIYA SHIMPI: Infant-directed speech research has tended to have low ecological validity. That is, previous research has focused on infants in a forced-choice environment in which infants could either look at the speech or not look at the speech (what, in reference to the common operant-conditioning technique of presenting rock doves with keys to peck in a small chamber, we call "baby in a box"). Our ASIA study, on the other hand, puts the baby in a high chair, playing with toys, which is more like what the infant would encounter in a real world setting. Researchers have examined motherese, but what about examining "other-ese?" During stimuli collection procedures for the ASIA study, we had two motherese "stars," a father who read about pancakes, using very exaggerated prosody and much higher speech than with us, and a four year old boy, who had the ability to make his infant brother squeal and laugh (more than his mother could), by the use of his voice, when he called his brother to his side, or said his name.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: Briefly, could you tell us what triggered your interest in research on this form of communication?

PRIYA SHIMPI: As an older sibling, I have always been interested in how siblings effect each other's language development. When I was a baby, my father, who was a formal man, would tape-record sessions with me, in which he would ask me questions and teach me words or songs. His voice with me was much softer, more gentle and higher pitched than his usual voice. I believe his speech modification helped keep my attention and my actions, reciprocally, encouraged him to keep using this type of language with me. Later, I would tape-record my brother (3 years younger) in an attempt to duplicate these earlier sessions. I have listened to these tapes, and my voice was also more infant-directed in nature when speaking to my baby brother. Growing up together, I spent more time speaking to him directly than my parents, who would usually speak to both of us, rather than one of us, since we were always together. I believe I had an impact on my brother's language environment, and as a result, on his development. I also believe that he had an impact on my language development, since I learned to modify my voice when speaking to him, and was able to translate for my parents when they did not understand what he was saying. By studying siblings and their social/linguistic interactions, I hope to better understand the role siblings play in reinforcing each other's social behavior and linguistic development.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: At the end of your sophomore year at I.U., you conducted a research study on the effect of adult speech on infant attention as a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) intern. What did you discover?

PRIYA SHIMPI: We discovered that although there was an effect for speech vs non-speech (infants exhibited more head turns and longer looking times when speech was presented vs silence), there was not a significant effect for the speech type (infant directed or adult directed) used. We determined that this may be a result of the stimulus material selected (the mothers' read Goodnight Moon, which itself is infant directed in nature). We have since collected new stimuli, consisting of a mother recounting her day to an adult (Mike Goldstein) and as a story to her infant. Infants were run in this condition, and we are presently coding the tapes.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: You are currently conducting an honors thesis at I.U. on the effect of sibling speech on infant attention. What hypotheses are you testing? What do you find most interesting, and important, about this line of research? Do you envision any applications to your work?

PRIYA SHIMPI: When textbooks in introductory or developmental psychology speak about the presence of siblings within 3 years of age with an infant in the home, it is usually written that the younger sibling is put at a disadvantage, since the older sibling takes up so much of the parents' attention, and that the infant is a third and minor participant in joint attentional focus. I would like to focus more on the interaction between the siblings themselves, without the parent, to gain more insight into how siblings interact and how older siblings speak to their younger siblings. I feel that this is an overlooked area of research and also that the effects of having an older sibling close in age is not detrimental, but that it is misunderstood as of yet.

An application of this study may be that by understanding the nature of sibling interactions and siblings reciprocal roles in each others' development, we could design learning tools which would beadvantageous to both the developing infant and preschool-aged sibling. It may change the way we structure our preschools, and perhaps family activity time.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR BULLETIN: Through the course of your extensive research at I.U. you have been exposed to many aspects of the scientific process. Do you have any suggestions for how science, as presently conducted, or how the topics commonly addressed by science at large research institutions such as I.U., could be improved?

PRIYA SHIMPI: Science, as seen through a child's eyes, involves hands-on activity. If one visits Wonderlab (Bloomington's children's science museum) , one would see children learning about physics by watching pennies roll seemingly endlessly down a large funnel, or learning about the natural world by petting cockroaches, or learning about technology by building their own robots, or learning about geology by digging for fossils in the sand. By digging our hands in the dirt, we can uncover for ourselves what science really is: curiosity, discovery, and sharing with others what we have found. I see my Honors Thesis as part of this type of science, and what I have learned from designing a study on a topic that personally interests me has helped me better understand the field and has also led me to other relevant ideas, which I hope to pursue in graduate school. After graduate school, I hope to return to the university setting as a professor, in order to share what I have learned with others. By offering more opportunities to students to explore their interests through individual research and giving them the ability to present their findings to others, universities will graduate not just students, but scientists and teachers.

Jessica Cooney, who has contributed to the Animal Behavior Bulletin in the past, is a sophmore at I.U., majoring in Psychology and Criminal Justice and minoring in Anthropology.