International Association for the Study of Child Language

From 19-23 July I attended the 12th meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) held at the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada. The program included 63 thematic symposia (250 papers) and 343 posters. I had the opportunity to hear papers from many experts including
Fred Genesee: Myths and misunderstandings about dual language acquisition in young learners
Simon E. Fisher: Building bridges between genes, brains and language
Deb Roy: A study of language development in context (see here for YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwgkT34g61w)

I presented a poster titled: Linguistic diversity in a nationally representative sample of Australian 4- to 5-year-old children and their parents.

I also enjoyed meeting authors of chapters from the International Guide to Speech Acquisition (McLeod, 2007) on French and Finnish. Previously I had only corresponded with them via email. It has been exciting to see the additional research that has been undertaken since 2007 in French and Finnish regarding children's speech acquisition.

Tuula Savinainen-Makkonen, Sharynne, and Sari Kunnari

Sharynne and Prof Yvan Rose - Memorial University of Newfoundland