Early Career Award

The IASCL’s Early Career Award is given to an IASCL member who is no more than 7 years post-PhD and whose research has demonstrated an outstanding contribution to the field of child language acquisition via a clear and independent programme as well as significant publications and scholarly activity. IASCL is committed to recognizing excellent research contributions, which entails the inclusion of all researchers regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability status, country of origin, geographic location, and disciplinary expertise. The award provides complimentary registration to the following IASCL congress, and the awardee will give the Early Career Award plenary speech at the congress.

2024 IASCL Early Career Award Announcement

The International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) received nine nominations for the Early Career Award (ECA), all of which were considered in detail by the Early Career Award Committee (L. Naigles, M. Taumoepeau, R. Argus).

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Rowena Garcia has won the IASCL inaugural Early Career Award! She will be recognized at the IASCL 2024 Congress in Prague, and give the ECA Plenary, whose title will be “Casting a wider linguistic net: Language acquisition insights from an Austronesian language.”

Moreover, the caliber of nominees overall was very high, so the ECA Committee decided to make two additional Commendations, to Dr. Rebecca Defina and Dr. Megan Gross. The ECA Committee encourages those nominees who will still be eligible to submit their materials again for consideration for the IASCL 2027 Early Career Award.

Read the citations from the ECA Committee below.

2024 IASCL Early Career Award Winner

Dr. Rowena Garcia earned her PhD in 2018, graduating magna cum laude with an International Doctorate in Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain, sponsored by the Universities of Groningen (NL), Newcastle (UK), Potsdam (DE), Trento (IT), and Macquarie University (AU). She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Speech Pathology, at the University of the Philippines in Manila and formerly held a post-doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Dr. Garcia’s research has broadened our understanding of how differences in linguistic structure across languages change the learning task, deepening our understanding of how the language acquisition mechanisms adapt to diversity. Her research has focused on the acquisition and processing of Tagalog, an understudied Western Austronesian language, and its typologically rare symmetrical voice system. In particular, she has used several different methodologies to investigate the online processing of voice and its relationship to word order in Tagalog, including self-paced listening and different versions of the visual world paradigm (i.e., eye-tracking). She has pioneered the use of web-based experiments to study grammatical processing in understudied languages, and has collected the first publicly available corpus of Tagalog caregiver-child interaction. Her independent research programme delves into, expands on, and challenges some of the core theories and findings of our field.

Dr. Garcia is the author of 15 articles (nine first-authored) in high-quality international journals, including Cognition, Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition, and Language Learning and Development. Her publications in all four of the major language acquisition journals show that her research transcends traditional theoretical divisions in the field; in other words, everyone is interested in what she has to say. Her 2022 paper with Evan Kidd in First Language, “How diverse is child language acquisition” had an immediate and major impact on our field, stimulating numerous investigations of child language in under-represented languages; it already has 122 citations.

Dr. Garcia has also played a leading role in creating and running the Truly Global L+ Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition, a highly successful free, week-long, online school that provides unique training, networking and collaboration opportunities to students and researchers from under-represented nations (mainly from the Global South). She has mentored students and practitioners both locally and internationally.

We are highly impressed with Dr. Garcia’s exciting and important independent research programme and look forward to her future contributions to our field.

Our Media Coordinator Dr. Katie Von Holzen congratulates Dr. Rowena Garcia for winning the inaugural, 2024 IASCL Early Career Award and asks her for her advice for senior scientists in the field of child language research. This clip is part of a longer interview with Dr. Garcia, which you can find here.

Dr. Rebecca Defina graduated PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingustics in 2016 examining serial verb constructions in Avatime, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana. She is the recipient of a prestigious Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research award, and is currently a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, School of Languages and Linguistics, where she will take up the position of Lecturer in Linguistics in 2026.

Dr Defina is developing a pioneering multifaced research programme concerned with the acquisition of Pitjantjatjara, a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in Central Australia. She has collected a naturalistic corpus of Pitjantjajara language data from children aged between 10 months and 10 years, as well as child-directed and adult-directed language data. Dr Defina’s research is pushing the field of language acquistion to diversify and include communities of understudied and indigenous languages and indigenous peoples. Her contributions in this regard can be clearly seen in her participation in the development of the Sketch Acquistion framework and manual, which is a comprehensive guide for assisting researchers to collect, analyse and document child and child-directed language data and socialisation practices from understudied languages.
Dr. Megan Gross earned her PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018, examining the linguistic, social, and cognitive factors involved in bilingual children’s code-switching. She is the recipient of a prestigious K23 Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Her research has focused on bilingual language development and neurodiversity, code-switching, cognitive control, bilingual assessment, and family-centered intervention. She has developed a separate and independent research programme targeting code-switching in bilingual children with and without language development disorders, with a focus on bilingual autistic children. The specific methods she deploys in her research are innovative and vary depending on the research focus, e.g. she has used carefully controlled experiments and also intensively analyzed naturalistic data. Dr. Gross also works extensively with the communities she researches, as a clinically certified bilingual speech-language pathologist, and as a trainer of future clinicians and researchers.