Finding common ground (with Jenna DiStefano)

This episode we introduce our new podcast editor Jenna DiStefano, a developmental psychology PhD student at UC Davis. During the first segement, we chat with Jenna about her research path, decision to apply to graduate school, and where her work is heading.

In the second segement, we discuss Jenna's paper exploring contextual differences in infant-directed speech (IDS). Her paper analyzes how parents may talk differently to their infants depending on the context at-hand. We speculate about what makes IDS "special" and its role in language development -- is it the lack of "common ground" between a parent and infant? Is it emotion? Something else?

Links
DiStefano, J., Cohn, M., Zellou, G., & Estes, K. G. (2025). Prosodic variation between contexts in infant-directed speech. Journal of Child Language, 1-23. Link

Apfelbaum, K. S., & McMurray, B. (2011). Using variability to guide dimensional weighting: Associative mechanisms in early word learning. Cognitive Science, 35(6), 1105-1138. Link