Click on the dropdown links below to read about our current studies
We are currently running a study which tests whether an app called BabblePlay can be used as a tool to encourage babies with Down syndrome aged between 7-15 months to make more sounds with their voice.
Families who are involved in the study either play with BabblePlay with their baby for 6 weeks, or play with a mirror for 3 weeks and then BabblePlay for 3 weeks. Families also complete 3 audio recordings throughout the study to capture the sounds their baby makes at home and compare across timepoints. We also wanted to see if families are willing and able to take part in the project and if they can use the app for the suggested timeframe.
We are currently running a study exploring how babies learn to talk in the first year of life.
We want to see how starting to produce sounds, in the form of babbling, affects how babies learn from and respond to the language they hear in their homes. We'll be recording babies at home and also running language experiments to try to answer our questions. The experiments will include a Listening Preference experiment, done over Zoom, and an exciting new method - ultrasound imaging of babies' tongues - which will help us understand how the tongue moves as it grows and changes in the first year of life.
We are recruiting families who are expecting a baby soon or have a baby between the ages of 0 and 2 months old.
We are interested in understanding what type of speech babies hear during different familiar daily activities. We want to find out if the speech changes with the activity or not, and if it matters what the child’s posture is or how they take part in the activity.
For that purpose we ask parents or carers to record themselves talking to their babies while they are doing all kinds of familiar activities: changing, bathing, feeding, dressing, playing, going for a walk. To understand how the baby participates in these activities, we also ask parents to report on the baby’s posture during the activity: was the baby running, sitting, lying on their belly, etc.
We are no longer recruiting participants for this study.
Sound symbolism is the link between sound and meaning - for example the word 'tiny' sounds small, and the word 'humongous' sounds big. This is also true for pitch: high-pitched sounds, such as the squeak of a mouse, sound small, and low-pitched sounds sound big. In this study, we looked at mothers' pitch when they talk to their babies about small and big items to see if they are more likely to use a high-pitched sound when talking about a small object, and vice versa. Studies have suggested that these cues might help infants learn new words. A study run by us, in which parents described pictures in a picture book to their babies, found no such use of pitch under most conditions. We are now investigating the same question using naturalistic video recorded interactions of parents with their children.
We are no longer recruiting participants for this study.
We are analysing video footage of day-to-day activities of infants growing up in urban UK and rural Uganda to determine whether there are any differences in the way that infants vocalize in these two communities. Typically, it is assumed that vocal development is consistent across populations, but there is very limited analysis of non-Western infants, and there may be large differences in the early environments experience by infants growing up in different parts of the world. We are comparing how much infants vocalize at 9 months old, what kind of sounds they produce (e.g. "pa" and "gaga" or less speech-like sounds such as cries and grunts), and how their parents respond to these sounds, to get a better understanding of how vocal development comes about and how the early environment influences this.
We are no longer recruiting participants for this study.