Our Methods
Lingual Ultrasound
Lingual ultrasound studies allow us to see what your baby is doing with their tongue during different activities, such as listening, resting, feeding, and drinking. This can help us understand more about how they learn the complex tongue movements needed to speak. Our lingual ultrasound studies take place in our special speech science lab, rather than the BabyLab, but we bring in a number of toys for your baby to play with during the study. We might send you a plastic ultrasound probe before the experiment so that your baby can get used to what it looks and feels like, or a chewy toy to practice with at home. This means that the ultrasound procedure is less unfamilar to them when they come to the lab.
The study will begin with a settling-in period, giving you and your baby time to get used to the surroundings. We'll then ask you to put some of the ultrasound gel under their chin, and let them get used to the cold sensation of the gel before we start. The procedure involves holding a small plastic probe under their chin - you will be able to see the scan of their tongue on the computer screen during the study. Depending on the study, they might be free to play, or watching a screen, or sitting in a car seat or chair. Sometimes we might show you how to hold the probe, and ask you to hold it instead of us if we think that would make the baby more comfortable. We typically only need a few seconds of data, so if your baby gets fussy when the probe is under their chin, it doesn't usually matter!
BabblePlay studies
In our studies with BabblePlay, your baby will play with a tablet app that responds with moving shapes when your baby makes sounds with their voice. Of course, we can't explain that to the babies! So we just wait for them to figure it out. Once they discover that the shapes appear when they make sounds with their voice, we think they treat this as a game, or at least as an exciting experience, and many babies will make more sounds, to see more shapes. BabblePlay audio-records your baby while your baby plays with it, and sends us an email with the sound file and with the information about the number of times your baby made sounds.
Most of the studies with BabblePlay take place in babies' homes. In most cases, we will send you a tablet to your home with instructions on how to use it. In many studies we will also send you something else to play with your baby with (like a mirror), to compare how the babies play with the two things. With both BabblePlay and the other object we will ask you to play with your baby, for 5 minutes at a time, at a time that suits you and your baby. Depending on the study, we will ask you to do this a certain number of times in a day or a week over a certain period. That allows us to collect information about how your baby's sounds changed over a period of time.
Central Fixation studies
In central fixation studies we measure how long babies are interested in (or pay attention to) different sounds. They are called 'central fixation' because what we measure is how long the baby looks (or 'fixates their gaze upon') the screen in front of them. The screen shows the babies a picture that is unrelated to what they are listening to, a moving abstract shape or a 'chessboard' display. But it gives them something to look at while they are listening... And babies tend to look at it as long as they are paying attention to the sounds they are hearing.
These studies might take place in the York Babylab or in your home, by Zoom. In both cases, your baby will sit facing a screen and hear different things - mostly speech but sometimes music or other sounds as well. We measure the time your baby looks to each of those. If you do the study in the lab, your baby sits on your lap in a 3-sided booth inside a room which is especially insulated from outside sounds and is rather dark and boring (so the babies don't have anything interesting to look at, apart from the monitor screen...). The parent or carer on whose lap the baby sits wears earplugs and headphones, so that they can't hear what the baby is hearing, in order that they won't unintentionally influence the baby's reactions. If you do the study at home, your baby sits independently, on a highchair or another kind of chair, so that even though you are not wearing earplugs, you cannot unintentionally influence their reactions.
The central fixation procedure itself takes about 5-7 minutes, but the visit to the lab takes up to half an hour (with getting from your car or from the bus stop to the lab, and getting your child settled and parking the pushchair and taking off coats...) and a Zoom session in the home might take about 15 minutes, with time taken for setting up and explaining the instructions, etc.
