Overview
Shannon is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Sanford School of Public Policy, working on Baby's First Years with Dr. Lisa Gennetian. Shannon's research examines children's language input and their developing language skills over time using various behavioral methods. She is interested in how children’s early language experience varies systematically between children and families (such as by child gender or family socioeconomic status) and how that affects children's language development. She has expertise investigating language development using experimental, observational, and longitudinal methods. On Baby's First Years, she is investigating the mechanisms of socioeconomic-based differences in children's language experiences and development.
Shannon completed her PhD in developmental psychology at Duke University in 2022, advised by Dr. Elika Bergelson. She received a BA in psychology with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Talking to talkers: Infants' talk status, but not their gender, is related to language input.
Journal Article Child development · March 2023 Prior research points to gender differences in some early language skills, but is inconclusive about the mechanisms at play, providing evidence that both infants' early input and productions may differ by gender. This study examined the linguistic input an ... Full text CiteLanguage input to infants of different socioeconomic statuses: A quantitative meta-analysis.
Journal Article Developmental science · May 2022 For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have c ... Full text CitePoint, walk, talk: Links between three early milestones, from observation and parental report.
Journal Article Developmental psychology · August 2019 Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare th ... Full text Open Access CiteRecent Grants
Unconditional cash transfers and maternal bandwidth among Low Income Mothers with Young Children in the U.S.
ResearchPostdoctoral Associate · Awarded by Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab · 2023 - 2024View All Grants