Research at the Centre - A General Overview

Understanding the mind and different perspectives and their influence on children's communication

The main focus of the research at the Centre is the development of young toddler and preschool children's understanding of the mind, and especially their growing perspective-taking abilities, and how children make use of these abilities in everyday communicative situations such as making requests, commenting, having a conversation with family members or peers, or telling or listening to a story.

One primary research topic at the Centre is therefore how children are developing communicative competence (their use of language, or the pragmatics of language as it is sometimes referred to more formally), and especially how communicative competence is impacted by children's growing perspective-taking abilities, such as their ability to take into account what a communicative partner might know or not know about.

Another primary research topic in more recent years has been to learn more about the kinds of perspective-taking involved in early narrative ability and how such perspective-taking in the story contexts may contribute to abilities in other domains of thinking, such as mathematics or problem-solving.

We study all these topics with experiments in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, such as preschool classrooms.

Assessing children's early pragmatic language development with a standardized questionnaire for parents: The Language Use Inventory (LUI)

In addition, another major research focus of the Centre is the development of a parent-report questionnaire, the Language Use Inventory (LUI): An assessment of pragmatic language development, suitable for children 18- to 47-months of age. Standardization of the LUI involved over 3500 Canadian children who took part in the Canadian Early Childhood Language Project.

We are very excited to announce that as of March 2009 the LUI is now available to researchers and clinicians. The LUI will provide a very much needed, empirically validated and normed questionnaire for speech-language pathologists, health professionals, clinicians and researchers to determine whether a child is delayed with respect to their use of language relative to their peers of the same age in months. and we hope to make it available very soon! Please visit the section of this website, The Language Use Inventory, to learn more about the LUI, its availability, and ongoing research!

In the subsections here of Research at the Centre, you can learn more about:

A list of published papers by Dr. O'Neill is also available.

This page last updated on November 6, 2010.