Word Play

When Sydney Sun, C’24, decided to transcribe 100 hours of audio recordings, she had no idea what would come of the effort. 

The recordings had been made by parents and children playing social skills and math games, part of a study being conducted by the Emotion, Development, Environment, and Neurogenetics (EDEN) lab run by Rebecca Waller, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Sun was intrigued—were the games affecting the language the children used? 

After spending months painstakingly transcribing, counting, and classifying each word in the recordings, Sun discovered that children playing the social game tended to match how often their parents used social-emotional words such as “love” or “sad”—something they didn’t do with the math game. “It was really surprising and astounding to see how the social context radically changed the way parents and children interacted with language,” Sun says. 

This work, which Sun has since presented at an international conference and published in the journal Scientific Reports, has inspired Waller to conduct more studies on the associations between language and children’s behavioral problems, opening new directions of research for the EDEN Lab. “What she’s doing is really foundational to an emerging field,” Waller says. 

Next up, she’s planning to attend medical school. Ultimately, Sun says she hopes to pursue a career in pediatrics as a clinical researcher, following in her mother’s footsteps. She’s not certain how her career will pan out, but says she’ll keep taking risks in the name of scientific pursuit.