The Kotoboo Team

Contributions

Comics

Drawings: Clara

Texts: Monica

Themes

Screen Time: Camillia, Sho, and Sarah

Language at Home: Irena, Hiromichi, Leticia, Caroline, Yuka, Meg, and Magda

Language Across the World: Camila, Georgia, Laia, Rachel, and Youtao

Bilingualism: Cécile, Irena, Andrea, Rachel, Laia, and Magda

Sign Languages: Charlotte

Literacy: Camillia, Charlotte, Leticia, and Sarah

Developmental Diversity: Andrea, Hiromichi, and Meg

Myth Busters: Everyone!

Translations

French: Cécile and Camillia

Japanese: Hiromichi, Mei, Yuka, Carlee, and Aaron

Arabic: Yasmeen and Amalia

Spanish: Andrea, Camila, and Laia

Mandarin Chinese: Mingdi, Jiarui, and Youtao

Brazilian Portuguese: Leticia

Ukrainian: Ganna

Web and Social Media

Website management: Monica, Cécile, Hiromichi, Youtao, and Sarah

Twitter: Charlotte, Andrea (English), and Rachel (Japanese)

Instagram: Leslie and Rachel

Facebook: Yuka

Profiles

Clara is a Master 2 student in Neuroscience and an intern at the LSCP (ENS, Paris) working on how different inputs from different cultures affect language acquisition. She dreams of combining science and art, and doodles all day long. She speaks French, English, Spanish and Arabic.
#art #scienceisfun!
Monica dreams of creating educational language learning games for children and adults, for native and second languages. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the IRCN Babylab in Tokyo, and moonlights as a writer. She speaks a bunch of languages, and adores listening to languages she does not know.
#thewriter #JaneAustenJr #webdesign
Camila works on the role of socio-ecological diversity in language and cognitive development. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher affiliated at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine in Zurich and the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris. She speaks French, Spanish, English, and a little bit of Tsimane’.
#languageacrosstheworld
Hiromichi is a postdoctoral researcher at the IRCN BabyLab, The University of Tokyo, Japan. He is interested in how word meanings emerge and change along with development. He is also a pediatric occupational therapist. He speaks Japanese and English.
#languageathome #developmentaldiversity #translation #web
Cécile works on the role of social environment in the language acquisition process, doing an intervention study in daycares. She is a PhD candidate at the Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics Lab, at ENS, Paris, and speaks French, English, and Italian.
#bilingualism #translation #web
Charlotte works on the syntactic description of French Sign Language, using both fieldwork with Deaf consultants and experimental studies. She is a Maitre de conférence (Teacher/researcher) at the Université de Paris 8 (SFL CNRS lab) and speaks French, English, and signs French Sign Language. #signlanguage #socialmedia
Andrea is a Mexican-Canadian graduate student at Dr. Byers-Heinlein’s Infant Research Lab at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her research focus is early language acquisition in bilingual environments. She is passionate about language in all its expressions and about doing creative and impactful science communication. She speaks Spanish, English and French.
#bilingualism #translation
Sho works on the role of the social environment on early language learning. She directs the IRCN Babylab in Tokyo and speaks German, Japanese, English, and French. 
#screentime
Yuka is a lab manager at the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvenia State University. She recently graduated from Middlebury College with a Neuroscience major and a Linguistics minor. She has worked as an intern at RIKEN Brain Science Institute Language Development Lab in Japan. Her interests include: phonetic acquisitions, emotional prosody, word memory processing and multilingual brain. She speaks Japanese, English, and Mandarin Chinese.
#languageathome #socialmedia
Carlee is a graduate student at Dr. Yuki Hirose’s lab in the Department of Language and Information Sciences at the University of Tokyo. They are interested in bilingualism and second language acquisition/processing (phonetics/prosody). They are Japanese-American and speaks English and Japanese.
#translation
Caroline is a Psychology PhD student in Dr. Daniel Swingley’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies early word learning and how infants deal with the variability in the speech they hear. She speaks English and French.
#languageathome
Mingdi is presently a project assistant professor at Keio University’s Baby lab. She received her Ph.D. degree in Systems Life Sciences (Bio-imaging) from Kyushu University in Japan after receiving her B.S. degree from Department of Mechanical Engineering of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China. Her research interests include social interaction between multiple persons, particularly mother-infant interaction under naturalistic situations (e.g., at home). Recently, she has been working on cognitive and physiological functions of infants and their mothers during daily interactions using ECG, fNIRS hyperscanning and day-long recordings. She speaks Mandarin, English, and Japanese. #translation
Youtao is a postdoctoral researcher at the IRCN Babylab in Tokyo. He is interested in differences across languages and how these differences affect learning and processing. He received his Ph.D. degree in cognitive science from Brown University. Besides languages and linguistics, Youtao has a broad interest in many other subjects and wants to get more involved in science communication. He speaks Mandarin and English, and is learning Japanese and Cantonese. He sketches for fun. #languageacrosstheworld #web
Laia is a Postdoctoral researcher at Dr. Byers-Heinlein’s Infant Research Lab at Concordia University, located in Montreal Canada. She is interested in how children’s early home environments influence their language development, particularly word learning. She studies that across different populations and cultures including monolingual, bilingual and multilingual children. Laia speaks Catalan, Spanish, English, French and some German.
#bilingualism #languageacrosstheworld
Leslie is interested in cognitive child development, from all aspects. She speaks French, English and a bit of Spanish and American Sign Language.
#socialmedia
Ganna is a graduate of Kyiv National University named after T. Shevchenko, teaches mathematics at the Kyiv National University of Economics, author of the idea and script for the interdisciplinary educational comic Blaise Pascal and Combinatorics. The sphere of scientific interests is mathematical modeling, data analysis and student mathematical Olympiads. She dreams of creating a series of comics about mathematics and mathematicians.
#translation
Sarah is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. Her project focuses on how literacy affects the way children learn language.
#screentime #web
Aaron is a dorky, joyful human working as a research technician at IRCN, the University of Tokyo. He is interested in trauma and how it alters three distinct domains: brain functions, identity development, and language acquisition. He speaks English, Japanese, very minimal Mandarin Chinese, and a bit of Manglish (Malaysian English).
#translation
Rachel works on bilingualism and cross-cultural differences in early language development and is interested in how variations in language environment impacts infants’ language experience. She is a post-doctoral researcher at RIKEN CBS Laboratory for Language Development in Japan, and speaks English, Cantonese, Japanese, and Mandarin.
#bilingualism #languageacrosstheworld
Leticia is a Brazilian researcher interested in investigating how children uncover the structure of the sentences they hear, and what helps them understand spoken and written words and sentences. She has a PhD in Linguistics from the State University of Campinas, in Brazil, and will soon start a postdoc at the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology and Child Education at the University of Paris. She speaks Brazilian Portuguese, English and French. #languageathome #literacy #translation
Meg has been an Assistant Professor at Tsuda College since April 2023, after working at the Baby Lab of the International Research Institute for Neurointelligence at the University of Tokyo. She is interested in both linguistic theoretical and experimental research on the relationship between social interaction and language learning in infants, and on children grammatical competence and performance. She has been working on her doctoral dissertation, and she is a mother of two kids.
#languageathome #developmentaldiversity
Magda is a PhD student at the MultiLADA lab at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw in Poland. She’s interested in monolingual and bilingual language development. In particular, how children acquire words and organise their vocabularies. She speaks Polish, English and French. #languageathome #bilingualism

Alumni

Georgia participated during her postdoc at the University of Stanford on the role of linguistic and cultural diversity on early language learning.
#languageacrosstheworld
Camillia participated during her lectureship at University Paris Nanterre on speech perception and processing and later literacy skills emergence.
#screentime #literacy
Mei participated during her fifth-year of medical school at the University of Tokyo and internship at the IRCN Babylab in Tokyo. #translation
Irena participated during her Ph.D at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University on early language development in infants with Hearing Loss and her postdoc at the IRCN, The University of Tokyo on daylong recordings.
#languageathome #bilingualism

Participating labs