UTD LILAC Lab

This Hispanic Heritage Month, we're celebrating bilingual language development!

Have you ever noticed that your voice changes when you talk to a baby? Maybe you speak a little higher, slow down, or repeat yourself. These changes are part of what researchers call parentese or infant-directed speech.

A recent study looked at how Spanish-English bilingual parents used parentese with their babies. Researchers found that bilingual parents also adjusted their speech when talking to their infants in both Spanish and English, with some differences between the two languages (Ramirez Barajas et al., 2025).

Swipe through to learn more about what this research tells us about the language experiences of bilingual families! 💛

Visit the link in our bio to read more!

Congratulations to our doctoral student, Rainy, for presenting preliminary findings from her new scoping review project at the 2026 School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences PhD Retreat during the Student Data Blitz! 📈

Her project “Narrative Performance in Mandarin-Speaking Children: A Scoping Review,” aims to summarize research from around the world on how Mandarin-speaking children tell stories, which is an important language skill. After searching nine research databases, she identified 49 studies that included Mandarin-speaking children and assessed some aspect of their narrative abilities.

One exciting and encouraging takeaway is that narrative skills in Mandarin-speaking children have been studied from many different angles—much more than we initially expected! Studies have examined how storytelling ability develops with age, how it differs in children with language difficulties, and how bilingual experiences shape the way children tell stories in each language. Researchers have also used a variety of ways to elicit children’s stories, with wordless picture books and picture cards among the most common. 📚

By looking at what research has been already conducted, this project helps researchers identify what we still need to learn and helps clinicians better understand how to support the language development when working with Mandarin-speaking children. 💜

Welcome back, Comets! ☄️ A new semester means new faces in the LILAC Lab!

We’re excited to introduce our newest research assistants joining us for Fall 2026. We’re so happy to have them on the team and can’t wait to see all they will learn and accomplish this semester. 👋💜

⭐ To learn more about our newest RAs, visit our lab website linked in our bio!

Towards the end of July, we said goodbye to our incredible lab manager Aline Guerrero!

Aline first joined the LILAC Lab as an undergraduate research assistant while earning her Bachelor’s Degree in Neuroscience at UTD. After graduating, she stepped into her role of lab manager since Spring 2024. She recruited nearly every undergrad who has joined the lab and helped assemble the amazing team we have today. We will deeply miss her cheerful energy, strong leadership, wonderful sense of humor, and incredible ability to bring people together.

Aline is off to the University of Houston where she will be pursuing her Master’s in Social Work! As difficult as it is to say goodbye, we are so proud of everything she’s accomplished and can’t wait to see all the amazing things she does next. Wishing you the best Aline! You will always be part of the LILAC Lab family! 💜

☀️ Make a splash with this fun summer pool language activity!

Go fishing for words, colors, and shapes while helping your child practice describing, following directions, and turn-taking through play. This activity can be adapted to your child’s language abilities by practicing simple colors and shapes or adding letters, and words!

Always supervise children around water and small materials.

🎣 Comment below if you’ll be trying this activity this summer!

🏠 Curious about your child’s at home language environment?

Families who participate in our studies have the option to participate in the at home language portion of our studies. Families will receive a free personalized Word Report generated from data collected using a Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) sampling device. The report highlights the number of adult words your child hears as well as the types of language and sounds in their everyday environment.

👉 Swipe to check out an example Word Report created from our lab manager, Aline, wearing a LENA device during a typical day in the lab!

☀️ Interested in participating? Visit the link in our bio to learn more about current LILAC Lab studies!

Shout out to our Spring 2026 Social Media Team!

A huge shoutout to our social media creators and undergraduate research assistants Hatay Sipahi and Kiaraliz Molina Cruz! They’ve been hard at work creating engaging posts to make research accessible to students, parents, and professionals as well as and sharing resources with families!

Thank you both for your dedication, and stay tuned for more posts this summer 💜☀️

Another amazing year, another LILAC Lab photo! Meet the 2025-2026 LILAC Lab team! 🪻

We’ve updated our lab photo yet again and, true to tradition, took one professional picture and one silly one. Swipe to see the smiling faces of our research team!

We are the The Language Interaction & Language Acquisition in Children (LILAC) Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas. We research how parent-child interactions support early language development in autistic children, bilingual children, and monolingual children. As we wrap up Spring 2026 and head into the summer, we can’t wait for another year of conducting new research, working with little ones and their families, and welcoming a new cohort of students to the lab!

🌱 To learn more about us, visit the linktree in our bio!