ERP participates in TalkTogether virtual roundtable on child-directed language corpora

Co-chairs and presenters at the TalkTogether Virtual Round Table Event held virtually last June 30 to July 2, 2021. (From top, left to right) Dr. Portia Padilla of the College of Education, UP Diliman, Dr. Mary Ann Bacolod of the Department of Linguistics, UP Diliman, Dr. Jocelyn Marzan of the Department of Speech Pathology, UP Manila, Dr. Jelena Mirkovic of York St John University, Dr. Sonali Nag of Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Dr. Dina Ocampo of UP CIDS ERP and College of Education, UP Diliman, Dr. Shelley Stagg Peterson of the University of Toronto–Ontario, Dr. Rauno Parrila of the Macquarie University, and Dr. Elena Lieven of the University of Manchester.

Last June 30 to July 2, 2021, the Education Research Program (ERP) of the University of Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies (UP CIDS) participated in the virtual roundtable discussion by the TalkTogether project entitled “Child-Directed Print Corpora: Understanding the Resource,” chaired by the project’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Sonali Nag (University of Oxford), Dr. Jelena Mirkovic (York St. John University), and ERP Convenor and TalkTogether Co-Investigator, Dr. Dina Ocampo. The three-day event aimed to promote understanding and discovery of possible uses of child-directed print corpora on child language acquisition and language processing, language assessment, experimental research on morpho-syntactic development, and in the development of children’s materials. Research from the project covered Filipino and Kannada languages.
The Philippine team of TalkTogether co-authored and presented papers during the Round Table
Discussion. It was a collaboration of minds from the UP Community, including faculty from the UP College of Education: Dr. Leonor Diaz, Prof. Marie Yvette Concepcion-Alcazar, Prof. Maria Hazelle Ongtengco, Dr. Marie Grace Reoperez, Prof. Crizel Sicat; the UP College of Social Science and Philosophy, Department of Linguistics: Dr. Mary Ann Bacolod, Dr. Jem Javier; the UP College of Arts and Letters, Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature: Prof. April Perez; UP Manila Department of Speech Pathology: Dr. Jocelyn Marzan; ERP Convenor Dr. Dina Ocampo, Senior Research Associates Kathrina Lorraine Lucasan and Junette Fatima Gonzales, and ERP Research Fellows, Margaret Mary Rosary Carmel Fua and Dr. Portia Padilla.
Other speakers and panel presenters include faculty and researchers on language and literacy from the University of Oxford, the Promise Foundation, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, University Sains Malaysia, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics–Netherlands, University of Toronto-Ontario, Macquarie University, and University of Manchester.
A quick question and answer portion followed every presentation to engage the participants who came from various parts of the world and time zones. This provided an opportunity for insights and clarifications to be made about the research done on the child-directed print corpora. The roundtable discussion ended successfully with the emergence of new research ideas on child language and literacy.
The TalkTogether team will release a public video playlist in early August. A blog on the proceedings of the round table discussion will soon be published online at the TalkTogether website (https://talktogether.web.ox.ac.uk) with one blog article authored by ERP Senior Research Associate Donna Pamella Romero.
TalkTogether is a multi-country project made possible by an award from the UK Research & Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI-GCRF Collective Fund). The wider aim of the project is to develop contextualized early years interventions to support oral language development, and thereby boost children’s literacy learning trajectories.