Early childhood language capability is closely tied to future success. Thus, it is vital to research how best to support the language acquisition process of young children. Extant literature emphasizes the role of children's parents but largely ignores the impact of other family members such as siblings. The primary goal of my research is to address this absence by investigating the effects of older sibling presence upon the language development outcomes of infants. I use a longitudinal dataset of audio recordings taken by Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) software. This software uses a small device worn by a child over an entire day to record their naturalistic linguistic environment for up to 16 hours. I focus on two main indicators of language input quality: parentese and conversational turns (CTs), both of which have been shown to promote language acquisition. Commonly referred to as “baby talk,” parentese is the acoustically exaggerated speech style typically used while addressing infants. CTs are alternations between speakers in one-on-one conversation, and often include nonverbal aspects of communication upon which infants rely for learning. My present findings demonstrate that infants with older siblings experience lower levels of these variables compared to infants without older siblings. However, the differences between language outcomes of the two groups were not as pronounced as expected based on this difference. Thus, with the help of fellow undergraduate coders, I am now coding and transcribing segments of LENA recordings of infants with older siblings that have the highest amount of speech from other children. I hope to uncover sibling input variables that may help infants with siblings to "catch up" to those without siblings regarding language outcomes. My results will inform those involved in early childhood development regarding how to facilitate the language acquisition process of young children with older siblings most effectively.

In many languages, nouns have what is called "grammatical gender," which is a seemingly arbitrary gender that is assigned to each noun. A common example would be Spanish, where nouns with the article la are feminine and those with el are masculine. In German, these noun genders are notoriously difficult to learn. This is, in part, due to the fact that German has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) compared to the more common two (masculine and feminine). In addition, there are often no markers at the ends of nouns to indicate whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter, which means learners cannot tell the gender of the word simply by looking at it. For example, in Spanish, feminine nouns often end with -a and masculine nouns with -o, which make the gender relatively easy to identify. This is not the case in German. Learners must, for the most part, learn noun genders through rote memorization. In this study, I test three different methods of helping native English speakers acquire the grammatical gender of nouns in German. I investigate whether learners can effectively acquire the gender and meaning of twelve German nouns with three mnemonic devices: color association, images, and videos with gendered actors. Participants are split into four groups, one control and one for each mnemonic device, where they are exposed to the nouns. The short-term effects of these visual aids are then revealed through two post-tests following the session. Based on previous research, I believe that the video condition will be the most effective at helping learners acquire noun gender. Given that memorization of grammatical gender is crucial to effectively learning a language, it is worth exploring innovative ways of helping students acquire this feature, especially for speakers whose first language does not have gendered nouns.