Feigenbaum Lab

Dr. Feigenbaum’s developmental psychology lab conducted experiments testing Lev Vygotsky’s theories of language acquisition, social behavior, and the development of higher cognitive functioning in children. Specifically, I was tasked with managing recordings of children playing alone and speaking to themselves and coding discrete speech acts. These private speech acts are central to Vygotsky’s theory of how the social mind emerges and develops. The lab was tasked with analyzing how speech complexity evolves as we age and demonstrating when certain kinds of speech patterns emerge. Other duties included attending weekly lab meetings, managing data storage and equipment, and running statistical modeling on speech data to confirm inter-rater agreement.