By: Melissa Perrett

I visited Melissa Redford’s language development lab to take a photo story on the work she does with speech pacing and development. On this day, Melissa was mentoring one of her graduate students while she observed.

1. Establishment Shot: Professor Melissa Redford leaves the waiting room of her language development lab to retrieve something from her office. Today, she is mentoring one of her grad students with a child during a language development study.

2. Close Up: Behind the camera and studio lights, Jaeci attentively listens to instructions before repeating back a sentence. The microphone on her hat closely monitors her pacing and rhythm, as well as how she chunks together words in a sentence. 

3. Action Shot: Graduate student Jill Potratz holds up cards of pictures and words while she asks Jaeci to repeat sentences that are unrelated to what she is saying. This monitors how visuals effect speech patterns and memory.

4. Detail Shot: Jaeci colors after repeating a series of sentences including the word “bedazzler.” She colors in one circle between each session of repeating sentences. Next, she will repeat sentences including the word “gack.”

5.  Interaction Shot: Jill and Jaecie joke during a break between language sets. Jill explains the next exercise they will do. She then shows Jaecie a series of photos and asks her to verbalize the subject of each photo before recording the next set of sentences from behind the camera.