Chandan Narayan is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. While completing his doctorate degree at the University of Michigan, Dr. Narayan became interested in his current area of research after taking a course in Language Acquisition. Growing up in a bilingual environment speaking both English and Tamil, Dr. Narayan is committed to exploring the diversity of languages spoken in the GTA. Last Friday, Dr. Narayan gave a public lecture titled “Patterns in Acquisition and Patterns in Sound Systems”, which presented findings from his work on the development of speech perception in infants from Tamil, Tagalog and Korean-speaking families.
Dr. Narayan’s research demonstrates that babies inherently perceive certain speech sounds more easily than others. Other speech sounds can only be perceived at later stages of an infant’s development, indicative of a more constrained language acquisition theory than previously thought. Dr. Narayan’s research findings will be important in propagating further studies in speech development disorders in infants and children in the future.
Baby participant: Sonia
As a professor for courses such as JLP315H1 and LIN322H1, Prof. Narayan has additional advice for undergraduate students looking to go into research or just considering taking one of his classes. The following is an excerpt of an online interview with Prof. Chandan Narayan:
Q: How many people are there on your research team? What roles do they play in the research process, including data collection and analysis?
A: My research team involved approximately 12 people over the course of three years. They were all undergraduate Linguistics or Psychology majors at UTSC. They played a critical role in the data collection process, as they were the directly interacting with moms and babies in their homes. They interacted with moms and recorded their speech. In the lab, the research team annotated the recordings and analyzed their phonetic structures.
Q: In your opinion, what is the most important quality in a researcher?
A: There’s a few: The ability to accept a conclusion that’s not exciting; the ability to spend time on a problem that doesn’t have a quick, publishable conclusion; the ability to learn from their peers and students.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring students looking to go into research within your field of interest?
A: Try to volunteer in research labs. Even if you’re relegated to making photocopies, you’ll learn something about the research process.
Q: How does teaching compare with conducting research? What do you hope your students will learn when taking one of your courses?
A: I love teaching. The moment when a student “gets it” is a fascinating one for me, and I can’t get enough of it. I hope that students come away from my courses with a richer understanding of the speech world around them, and not to take speech and the diversity of languages for granted.
Q: What do you think is the best part about your work?
A: I get to think about and investigate questions that keep me up at night.
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