Melanie Soderstrom

Melanie Soderstrom is Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on the development of language in infants, employing both experimental methods in the laboratory (testing infants' behavioural 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 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.

• 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

• Beyak, A.A., Cadieux, O., Cook, M., Cressman, C., Jain, B., Joshi, J.A., Martin, S.L., Mielniczek, M., Montazeri, S., Sawatzky, J., Smith, B.C., Spear, J., Perera, E.I., Thompson, T., Trudel, D., Zeng, J., & Soderstrom, M. (2022). "What can we perceive in infant vocalization?" Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 31977.
• 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. (2021). "Analysis of Children’s Everyday Language Experiences Using Longform Audio: Promises and pitfalls." Journal for the Study of Education and Development (Infancia y Aprendizaje), 44(2), 477-501.
• 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.
• Byers-Heinlein, K. …Soderstrom, M., …. & Wermelinger, S. (2021). "A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech." Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(1), 1-30.
• Cristia, A., Lavechin, M., Scaff, C., Soderstrom, M., Rowland, C., Räsänen, O., Bunce, J., Warlaumont, A., Bergelson, E. (2021). "A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (LENATM) system." Behavior Research Methods, 53(2), 467-486. 
• Byers-Heinlein, K., Bergmann, C., Davies C., … Soderstrom, M. (2020). "Building a collaborative Psychological Science: Lessons from ManyBabies 1." Canadian Psychology, 61(4), 349-363.
• Cychosz, M., Romeo, R., Soderstrom, M., … Cristia, A., Casillas, M.,… (2020). "Longform recordings of everyday life: Ethics for best practices." Behavior Research Methods, 52(5), 1951-1969.
• 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.