Current Projects
Click on the links below to read about our current studies
Can babies with Down syndrome use the BabblePlay app?
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.
We hope to trial BabblePlay as a language intervention tool with babies with Down syndrome in the near future.
Sound symbolism in mothers' speech to their infants
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. Our findings show that mothers don't reliably use pitch to indicate different-sized objects. The only time they did was when they were talking about two identical objects that differed only in size. Then, they used a higher pitch to label the smaller object, and a lower pitch to label the bigger object.
Phonological networks in early language development
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.
[GitHub repository] [pre-print]
Analysing the role of sensorimotor feedback in early language development
We are currently 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 a new project led by Catherine Laing, where we plan to record babies in their homes so we can hear the sounds they make in their day-to-day lives, combined with ultrasound experiments looking at tongue movements and eye-tracking studies to understand their language knowledge. Check back soon for more details about this study, and information on how to get involved!
Infant vocal development in the UK and Uganda
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.
A child's developing ability to move and sleep patterns are connected to their vocabulary growth
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!
Investigating the speech babies hear in their daily lives
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.