Drew Weatherhead
Assistant Professor

Email: Drew.Weatherhead@dal.ca
Fax: 902-494-6585
Mailing Address:
- Language acquisition
- Sociolinguistics
- Social cognition
- Cognitive development
- Infancy
- Word Learning
*Dr. Weatherhead isnotcurrently accepting Clinical PhD students
*Dr. Weatherhead willnotbe supervising Honours Students in the 2026-2027 academic year
*Dr. Weatherhead willԴdzbe supervising Directed Research/Independent Project students in the 2026-2027 academic year
Education
COGS-P-BCH (Queen’s University)
PhD (University of Waterloo)
PDF (University of British Columbia)
Research Interests
Broadly, my research investigates mechanisms of early language acquisition. I study infants and young children using a variety of methods including eye-tracking and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Much of my work is focused on sociolinguistic development. My lab is interested in how infants and children process accented speech, and how speaker characteristics such as race influence their perception.
Selected Publications
- Ryken, A., Tupper E.,Weatherhead, D.(2024). Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
- Weatherhead, D.,& Werker, J. F. (2022). 20‐month‐olds selectively generalize newly learned word meanings based on cues to linguistic community membership.Developmental Science.Ǿ:
- Weatherhead, D.,& White, K. S. (2021).Toddlers link social and speech variation during word learning.Developmental Psychology,57(8), 1195. Ǿ:
- Weatherhead, D., Kandhadai, P., Hall, D. G., & Werker, J. F. (2021). Putting mutual exclusivity in context: Speaker race influences monolingual and bilingual infants’ word‐learning assumptions.Child Development, 92(5), 1735-1751.
- Weatherhead, D.,Nacar-Garcia, L., Arredondo, M.M.,& Werker, J.F. (2021). The role of audiovisual speech in fast-mapping and novel word retention in monolingual and bilingual 24-month-olds.Brain Sciences, 11(1), 114. Ǿ:
- Weatherhead, D.& White, K. S. (2018) And then I saw her race: Race-based expectations affects infants’ word processing.Cognition.177,87-97. Ǿ:
- Weatherhead, D., White, K. S., & Friedman, O. (2016). Where are you from? Preschoolers infer background from accent.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,143, 171-178. Ǿ: