UCLA Language and Cognitive Development Lab · Research Assistant · 2021–2023
Research in Context
How do children learn from the language around them?
Before I was designing digital experiences, I was studying how people learn.
As a research assistant in UCLA's Language and Cognitive Development Lab, I worked on research exploring how children learn language and information from the world around them. Our studies looked at different forms of language input, from conversations and everyday interactions to podcasts and other media.
What interested me most was that learning doesn't always happen through direct instruction. Children are constantly encountering information, deciding what to pay attention to, and making sense of what they hear.
This became an early foundation for the questions I continue to explore through design: what captures our attention, how do we make sense of information, and how do the environments around us shape what we learn?
The Questions
What happens when learning isn't intentional?
Children don't need to be actively trying to learn for learning to happen.
Across the research I worked on, I became interested in what happens when children encounter information indirectly: through a podcast, an overheard conversation, or language that wasn't specifically directed toward them.
This raised a broader set of questions:
What do we notice?
What do we learn from what we notice?
How does the environment around us influence what we take away?
These questions made me think about learning as something that happens continuously, not just when someone is sitting down to be taught.
Three Studies
Exploring learning across different language environments
Podcast Engagement
What can children learn from podcasts?
This study explored children's engagement with podcast content and how they respond to language and information presented through audio.
Learning About Science
How do children build knowledge from spoken information?
This research looked at how children learn about scientific concepts through language and what supports their understanding of new information.
Overhearing
Together, these studies offered different ways of looking at the same larger question: how does the language around us become something we learn from?
My Role
As a research assistant, I supported the research process across recruitment, data collection, and analysis.
My work included:
Participant recruitment
Recruiting and coordinating children and families participating in research studies.
Coding
Coding children's responses and behaviors using established research protocols.
Transcription
Transcribing recorded interactions and preparing data for analysis.
Research organization
Organizing research materials and data across multiple studies and maintaining consistency across research protocols.
Working with children also meant learning to pay attention to small details. A pause, a response, or a moment of engagement could become meaningful data when viewed in the context of a larger research question.
Findings
Children can learn complex ideas from audio alone.
One of the central questions was whether children could learn complex scientific concepts from a podcast, and whether adding visual information would improve their learning.
Children listened to an 11-minute podcast about the water cycle. Some listened to the audio alone, while others also viewed related images. The images didn't improve learning.
Children in both conditions were able to recall information from the podcast and answer questions that required them to apply what they had learned to a new context. The children who saw the images also didn't incorporate the visual information into their explanations of the concepts.
This suggested that podcasts can support more than passive listening. Children were able to learn higher-order concepts and transfer what they learned beyond the original context, even without visual support.
The context around learning matters, too.
A second study looked at what happened when children listened to the podcast with a parent.
Different conversation prompts changed how parents talked with their children and affected what children recalled from the podcast. But these conversations did not improve children's ability to generalize what they had learned to a new context.
For me, the interesting part was the distinction between remembering information and being able to use it somewhere new. Adding more to a learning experience doesn't automatically make it more effective. A visual layer didn't improve learning, and more conversation didn't necessarily lead to better transfer.
The research made me more interested in the conditions surrounding information: what people pay attention to, how they make sense of what they encounter, and what allows learning to move beyond the original experience.
From Psychology to Design
From studying learning to designing for it
My background in psychology taught me to start with the person before starting with the interface.
Research gave me a way to ask questions about behavior before making assumptions about it. Design gave me a way to turn those questions into experiences.
The transition from psychology to UX wasn't a departure from this work. It was a continuation of the same curiosity.
I went from asking how children learn from their environments to asking how digital environments shape what people notice, discover, learn, and do.
Reflection
This project shifted how I think about motivation.
From studying learning to designing for it
Looking back, this research was an early version of the questions I'm still asking today.
How do environments shape what we notice?
How does the way information is presented change what we understand?
How can technology support curiosity instead of competing for attention?
And how might we design experiences that help people learn, explore, and grow, rather than simply consume?
Those questions started in a developmental psychology lab.
They're still shaping the way I design today.
Purpose-driven at heart, I build products part of something greater ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧