Bio

Dr. Cychosz investigates how infants and children develop speech and language, including children who are d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing and multilingual learners. Her research bridges linguistics, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and electrical engineering to understand fundamental questions about language acquisition. Her interdisciplinary approach combines fieldwork with computational methods, using deep learning and automatic speech recognition tools to analyze naturalistic speech recordings from children's daily lives. She is particularly interested in how children's processing limitations might influence the structure of the world's languages, how sensory experiences like hearing loss affect language processing in early childhood, and how technological innovations can make language research more accessible and representative. Dr. Cychosz directs the Speech and Cognitive Development Lab and collaborates with clinical partners in audiology and speech-language pathology to ensure her research has translational impact to support children's language development.

Academic Appointments

Administrative Appointments

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University (2025 - Present)
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA (2023 - 2025)

Honors & Awards

  • Clinical and Translational Science Institute Early Career Development Award, UCLA (2024)
  • Elizabeth M. Keithley Early Stage Investigator Award, Hearing Health Foundation (2024)
  • Raymond H. Stetson Scholarship in Phonetics and Speech Science, Acoustical Society of America (2019)

Program Affiliations

  • Symbolic Systems Program

Professional Education

  • PhD, University of California, Berkeley, Linguistics (2020)

Contact

  • Academic
    mcychosz@stanford.edu
    University - Faculty Department: Linguistics Position: Assistant Professor

Additional Info

Links

2025-26 Courses

All Publications

  • Gendered speech development in early childhood: Evidence from a longitudinal study of vowel and consonant acoustics JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE Wong, E., Koeppe, K., Cychosz, M., Munson, B. 2025: 1-28

    Abstract

    Adults rate the speech of children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and assigned female at birth (AFAB) as young as 2.5 years of age differently on a scale of definitely a boy to definitely a girl (Munson et al., 2022), despite the lack of consistent sex dimorphism in children's speech production mechanisms. This study used longitudinal data to examine the acoustic differences between AMAB and AFAB children and the association between the acoustic measures and perceived gender ratings of children's speech. We found differences between AMAB and AFAB children in two acoustic parameters that mark gender in adult speech: the spectral centroid of /s/ and the overall scaling of resonant frequencies in vowels. These results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old speak in ways that reflect their sex assigned at birth. We interpret this as evidence that children manipulate their speech apparatus volitionally to mark gender through speech.

    View details for DOI 10.1017/S030500092500011X

    View details for Web of Science ID 001458986300001

    View details for PubMedID 40181680

  • The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE Cychosz, M., Edwards, J. R., Munson, B., Romeo, R., Kosie, J., Newman, R. S. 2025; 52 (2): 377-398

    Abstract

    Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of children with typical hearing: by chronological age and hearing age. Each child completed a long-form, naturalistic audio recording of their home environment (appx. 16 hours/child; >730 hours of observation) to measure adult speech input, child vocal productivity, and caregiver-child interaction. Results showed that children with cochlear implants and typical hearing were exposed to and engaged in similar amounts of spoken language with caregivers. However, the home environment did not reflect developmental stages as closely for children with implants, or predict their speech outcomes as strongly. Home-based speech-language interventions should focus on the unique input-outcome relationships for this group of children with hearing loss.

    View details for DOI 10.1017/S0305000924000023

    View details for Web of Science ID 001163609500001

    View details for PubMedID 38362892

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC11327381

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7523-0503