Melanie Soderstrom

Melanie Soderstrom joined the University of Manitoba in 2008 and served as Associate Head (Graduate) from 2014-2023. She is currently Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Psychology and serves as chair of the Senate Committee on Appeals. Her research focuses on the development of language in infants, employing both experimental methods in the laboratory (testing infants' behavioral responses to speech sounds) and observational methods by recording and analyzing infants’ everyday language experiences. She has been active in the Open and Collaborative Science movement in infancy research, serving on the Board of ManyBabies and leadership in several ManyBabies projects, including as co-lead of the first ManyBabies project, examining infants' preference for infant-directed speech. She is co-Director of the SSHRC-funded Partnership “CONNECT”, which brings together largescale collaborative research networks from across the social sciences to study and improve these research approaches. She also led the ACLEW project, which developed new tools and resources for the study of infants' everyday experiences across cultures and languages. Current projects with her students examine the nature of infant-directed speech in Iranian families and the impact of maternal mental health on maternal speech, as well as the role of caregiver behaviours on novelty-seeking in infants..

• PhD (Psychological and Brain Sciences), Johns Hopkins University, 2002
• MA (Psychological and Brain Sciences), Johns Hopkins University, 2000
• BSc (Biology), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998

Research interests

• Infant speech perception
• Open and collaborative science
• Naturalistic recordings of infant language experience
• Cross-cultural studies

• Bunce, J., Soderstrom, M., Bergelson, E., Rosemberg, C., Stein, A., Alam, F., … Casillas, M. (2025). A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences. Journal of Child Language, 52(4), 786–814.
• Soderstrom, M., Rocha-Hidalgo, J., Muñoz, L. E., Bochynska, A., Werker, J. F., Skarabela, B., … Tsui, A. S. M. (2024). Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study. Journal of Child Language, 1–26.
• Bergelson, E., Soderstrom, M., Schwarz, I. C., Rowland, C. F., Ramírez-Esparza, N., R. Hamrick, L., ... & Cristia, A. (2023). Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children from six continents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(52), e2300671120.
• Visser, I., Bergmann, C., Byers-Heinlein, K., … Soderstrom, M., ... & Zettersten, M. (2022). "Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e35.
• Soderstrom, M., Casillas, M., Gornik, M., Bouchard, M., MacEwan, S., Shokrkon, A., Bunce, J. (2021). "English-speaking Adults' Labeling of Child-and Adult-directed speech across languages and its relationship to perception of affect." Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 3723.
• Soderstrom, M., Casillas, M., Bergelson, E., Rosemberg, C., Alam, F., Warlaumont, A., & Bunce, J. (2021). "Developing a cross-cultural annotation system and metacorpus for studying infants’ real world language experience." Collabra: Psychology, 7(1), 23445.
• The ManyBabies Consortium. (2020). "Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference." Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(1), 24–52.