Tian Christina Zhao is a 2024 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award finalist. She is a research assistant professor at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, US.
Zhao received an undergraduate degree from Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma, US) and a PhD from the University of Washington (Seattle, US). After completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, Zhao started her laboratory there in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences in 2022. Her research examines how early auditory learning takes place in the infant brain and how it relates to language development.
Zhao’s award-winning NOMIS & Science essay is “Bringing music back to our children: Greater exposure to music can benefit language learning in infants.”
Abstract
Infants learn an incredible amount of information about their sound environment, including language and music, before they even turn 1 year of age. Using laboratory-based randomized controlled studies, our research has previously shown that highly social and engaging music experiences can enhance infants’ neural processing of speech, a hallmark of language development. Yet we know very little about infants’ everyday music experiences. In a new study, we developed a crowdsourced approach to annotate a large longitudinal dataset of daylong audio recordings made in North American infants’ home environments. Our analysis revealed that infants experience very little music compared to speech. Further, most of the music is from electronic devices unintended for the infant, whereas most of the speech is specifically directed at infants from a person.