See news from our lab below, and read more about our current studies and recent findings in our latest newsletter!
We are recruiting for an online study exploring how babies respond to different sounds they hear! This project is led by Khalid as a part of his PhD project. This study will be done over Zoom so anyone based in the UK can participate.
If your child is between 2 and 6 months old, with no known risks for developmental delays or disorders, if you are an English-speaking household, and you live in the UK, then please sign up to our Google Sign up Form to find out how to get involved!
Tamar Keren-Portnoy and Catherine Laing were invited to give a talk at the LGA conference on Speech, Language and Communication in the First 1001 Days. Catherine presented a talk entitled "How does early production shape how babies learn?" and Tamar's talk was called "Evaluating the BabblePlay app intervention to encourage vocalising in infants with Down Syndrome".
A new paper by Catherine Laing is now published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. The paper explores how similar infants' early words sound, and how that might help them deal with the challenges of learning to produce new words. The paper finds that infants' early words sound more similar to one another than we might expect, and that when they learn a new word, they are likely to produce it similarly to existing words in their vocabulary. You can read the paper here.
We are starting to run a project looking at how babies learn to talk in their first year of life! This project will take place over the course of about a year and involves a combination of home recordings, Zoom sessions, and lingual ultrasound sessions, which is a non-invasive imaging technique where we will look at the movement of babies' tongues!
If you are expecting a baby soon, or have a child who is between 0 and 2 months old, with no known risks for developmental delays or disorders, if you are an English-speaking household, and you live in the York area, then please sign up to our Google Sign up Form to find out how to get involved!
A new article in PsyPost has gone live and features and interview with our very own Florence Oxley! This article is titled "How well can genetic scores predict IQ? Here's what the latest research reveals" written by Eric W. Dolan. In this, Florence discusses some of the findings from the paper "DNA and IQ: Big deal or much ado about nothing?- A meta-analysis." You can check out the article here.
A new blog post by Florence Oxley for Psychology Today is now live on their website! This post is titled "What DNA can-- and can't-- tell us about intelligence" and shares information about the relation between DNA and IQ that was explored in her meta-analysis (mentioned below), and other vital research, in an interesting and bite-sized way! You can read the post here.
A new paper by Catherine Laing, Tamar Keren-Portnoy and their collaborators Ghada Khattab (Newcastle University) and Shayne Sloggett (University of York) is now published in Journal of Child Language. The paper is called "Size sound symbolism in mothers’ speech to their infants" and analyses mothers' pitch when referring to small and big objects in infant-directed speech. You can read it here.
A new paper by Florence Oxley, Kirsty Wilding, and Sophie von Stumm (Department of Education, University of York) has been published in Intelligence. This is a meta-analysis looking at whether genetics can reliably predict intelligence. You can read the paper here!
In September, we had a new member join our BabyLab team! Welcome Raji! She has joined us from the University of Göttingen, where she completed her PhD. She will be working with Catherine on her study of sensorimotor feedback and vocal development in infancy.
We've recently welcomed four new members to our BabyLab team! Welcome to Sab Arshad, Charlotte Blake, Laura Boundy and Florence Oxley. Sab and Laura are working with Tamar on her BabblePlay study with babies with Down syndrome, and Charlotte and Florence are working with Catherine on her study of sensorimotor feedback in infancy.
Margherita has now finished her PhD in York and will be moving on to a postdoc position at LPNC, a lab at Université Grenoble Alpes, with Louise Goupil leading the way. She'll be studying how babies learn to control their own baby talk. Best of luck Margherita!
A new paper by Catherine Laing and Elika Bergelson (Harvard University) looked at how having more versus fewer siblings might affect the vocabulary size and early language environment of infants upto age 18 months. They found that infants with 2 or more siblings had smaller vocabularies at age 18 months, and that they heard less words from their caregivers than children with no siblings, and even those with one sibling. Read the paper here.
Margherita Belia successfully defended her thesis, entitled "Exploring the interplay of sleep, memory and development in infancy: A holistic perspective on vocabulary learning" in December! Her examiners were Eytan Zweig and Jessica Horst. Congratulations Margherita!
A study by Margherita Belia, a PhD student in the BabyLab, show that napping shortly after hearing new words helps babies remember them: 7-8-month-olds who napped shortly after hearing new words in one voice were better at recognising them in a new voice on the next day, after they also slept at night. Babies who did not nap shortly after hearing the words for the first time did not show such an improvement. This means that naps, combined with night-time sleep, support recognition of new words in babies.
We are starting to run a study to see whether ultrasound, a non-invasive imaging technique, can be used to study the growth and development of infants' anatomy and vocal abilities. We will also ask if changes in the vocal tract during development affect infant vocalisations.
If your child is between 5 and 12 months old and you live in the York area, please go to our sign up page to find out how to get involved!
Congratulations to Nikki, who passed her PhD viva with no corrections on 13th September! Nikki is Associate Head of the School of Education, Language and Psychology at York St John University. Her PhD thesis is entitled Vowel Acquisition in a Multidialectal Environment.