I spent my elective at the emergency department of the Keski-Suomen Sairaanhoitopiiri, a tertiary teaching hospital found in the Finnish city of Jyvaskyla.

Sometimes consultants permitted me to have one-on-one interviews with patients to get to know them better. These interviews were typically informal and unstructured, but allowed me to get comfortable talking to patients and asking about topics relevant to their care.

As part of the $28-million ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at ANU, the project is looking to explain individual variability among children: why some two-year-olds have more than 200 words in their vocabulary while some have none.