Click on the dropdown links below to read about our completed projects
Babies with Down syndrome played with a mirror one week and with the BabblePlay app the following week. With BabblePlay, when babies make speech sounds, colourful shapes appear on an iPad screen. Would the babies understand that they were creating the shapes with their voice?
Only half the parents thought they did, but the babies showed us otherwise! 82% vocalised more sounds when playing with BabblePlay than with the mirror.
The way babies produce words they already know might help them learn how to produce new words. When a baby's vocabulary is growing, they are likely to produce a number of different words in the same or similar ways (e.g. daddy, doggy and dummy as "dada"). This might help them manage the challenges of early word learning - from remembering to producing newly-learned words.
In this study, we analysed thousands of early words. Computational models could predict which words infants would learn based on the way they produced the words they already knew. This suggests that infants might produce lots of words in a similar way as a strategy for learning, which might explain how they can learn lots of words very quickly.
We have been piloting a new way of analysing babies' speech development, by using ultrasound imaging of the tongue. We are testing babies between 6 and 12 months of age, using ultrasound to view their tongue position, shape and movement while doing different activities - playing, feeding, drinking, and resting. This is a pilot study for the new project led by Catherine Laing, called SENFM.
We collected information about babies’ vocabularies, motor skills and sleep habits when they were 7, 12, 16 and 24 month-old. We found that at 7 months, babies who napped less and crawled less frequently had smaller vocabularies. At 12 months, babies who walked more frequently had bigger vocabularies. Our results suggest that daytime napping is important for young babies’ vocabulary development. Our results also show that movement and language may be directly linked. Studies have suggested that this might be because, when babies start moving around, they have more opportunities for interactions with people around them. Think about it: when your little one has crawled across the room, and you need them to stop, you can't simply move them – you speak to them!