Welcome to York BabyLab

How do babies learn to talk?

In the York BabyLab we study many different aspects of this question. We want to know how much parents’ different ways of talking to their children help the children to learn. We are also interested in how babies’ own babbling, and later, their different ways of forming words affect the way they listen to speech and learn more words.

We use different methods to study these questions: In some cases we visit babies’ homes to record them (and more recently, we even record babies on Zoom!), in others the family comes to the lab to perform different tasks. We are learning a lot from these activities – and we think the families enjoy them too, not least the babies, for whom everything is new!

We work with speech and language therapists and charities to apply what we have learned to improving language outcomes for children, and language resources for the people working with them. We also work across cultures, so our focus is not entirely on babies learning in Western cultures.