Researcher in Profile: Rondeline Williams on How Environmental Noise Impacts Children’s Learning

By Chia-wa Yeh, Head Teacher and Research Coordinator

How might environmental noise affect children’s learning? Are young children sensitive to the type of sounds that best suits their changing goals?

Rondeline Williams, a fifth-year Stanford graduate student in developmental psychology, has been investigating these questions at Bing Nursery School over the last two years. More than 150 children have participated in her studies.

Williams, a Southern California native, was raised in a family of educators and school workers: Her grandmother was an elementary school teacher for more than 30 years; her mother a middle school teacher; her father a school bus driver; and her younger brother an elementary school teacher.

As an undergraduate at Cornell University, she majored in psychology and minored in Africana studies. At Stanford, she works in the Language and Cognition Lab, led by her faculty adviser, Professor Michael Frank. When not collecting data, she enjoys collecting treasures she finds at thrift stores and estate sales across the Bay Area, crocheting, and meditating.

The following is an interview with Williams.

Tell us about your research interests and your current study.

I am interested in how young children learn in noisy auditory environments, and I have a special interest in word learning. The current study explores children’s understanding of the auditory environment’s influence on goal achievement.

What got you interested in research about auditory inputs?

Before coming to Stanford, I worked in a language development lab at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. There, we studied how deaf children with hearing aids and cochlear hearing implants learn spoken language. For these children, the auditory signal they receive with their devices is degraded and sometimes muffled; their auditory experience is unique. One feature of our study was asking families to take home an audio recording device and record their children’s day. When I listened to these recordings, I was struck by how different the auditory experiences were across families, especially the various noise sources. I started thinking about how noise might be related to language acquisition and implemented a study to examine this. This study is still ongoing, but it has completely changed my research trajectory!

Tell us about the studies you’ve conducted at Bing.

My current study explores children’s understanding of how auditory environments influence goal achievement. In the first study, we introduced 3- to 5-year-old children to two Lego friends, Joe and Mandy. We then introduced them to four small wooden houses lined up on a table with two other Lego characters inside. Attached to the back of each house was an audio button that played one sound—instrumental music, babble from multiple talkers, white noise, or silence. These buttons were hidden from the child’s view to simulate the sound coming from inside the house. Joe and Mandy had a list of four activities they wanted to complete—dancing to music, reading a book, taking a nap, and talking to each other. Children were invited to hold Joe and Mandy and help them decide whether they should complete each activity in a room. We walked through one house at a time by simultaneously opening the door and pressing the sound button. We then asked children, “Should Joe and Mandy [dance, read, nap, talk] in this room?”

All the activities in Study 1 were familiar activities that the children have probably done at home or elsewhere. Study 2 explores whether children can extend this understanding to activities they have never heard. In other words, is children’s understanding of how auditory environments influence goal achievement flexible? Here, children completed the same task, but we replaced familiar activities with novel ones—frawing: when someone reads you a bedtime story before you fall asleep; gobbing: when you are looking for something fun to do; plipping: when you spin around in circles to a beat; and terbing: when you don’t want anyone else to know your tummy is making noises.

What were the results, and what do they tell us about children’s development?

In Study 1, we found that children were using the auditory signals from each house to decide whether it was appropriate for each activity. This was true for even the youngest children! Data collection for Study 2 is ongoing, but we have preliminary evidence that children are also reasoning about the novel activities. These results suggest that children are sensitive to the sounds in their environment and that they may use these sounds to inform what to learn and how to behave.

What was it like to conduct research at Bing?

Conducting research at Bing has been so much fun! My undergraduate research assistants and I have enjoyed getting to know the children and teachers in each classroom, and it is often a highlight of our weeks. As game-room teachers, we spend several hours in the classroom before inviting any child to participate in our study. We build blocks together, read books at snack time, assist in building sand structures, and participate in anything else the children’s imaginations suggest. This allows us to develop positive relationships with the children so they feel comfortable and excited about participating in research. My personal favorite feeling is when I walk into a classroom and a child runs up to me excitedly asking to play my game in the game room. Many of the children really do get some pleasure out of participating in research, and that is one of the reasons I continue researching at Bing. At the end of one session, the child participating in the study stopped me and said, “Wait, let’s put Joe and Mandy back in this house so they can sleep.” It was great to see how engaged children were in the game, even after we finished.

What are your next steps? What do you plan to investigate further and why?

We are currently running a follow-up study to the previous two to explore the mechanism that drives children’s auditory environmental sensitivity. Do children rely on association—meaning that activities are conventionally paired with certain auditory environments (e.g., dancing in a room with music on)—or some other cognitively flexible process, one that centers on exploration (e.g., if music is not one of the choices, which room would children choose for the Lego characters to dance in when given room options with noise not associated with music)? If children rely on exploration, this may suggest that they can use auditory information as a cue for where best to learn. This flexibility could be a key to understanding how children learn in noisy environments. We are excited to invite another 72 children to participate in this study in the coming months, and Bing will continue to play a major role in this work!