1. The link between speech production and perception in infants |
This study aims to replicate a study we ran a few years ago in Wales. It investigates the way in which what your baby can say affects the way that they understand the speech that they hear. We need babies from English-speaking homes in the York area that are not yet producing words, aged 8-9 months. We are interested in finding out whether babies at this age notice speech that contains the sounds they regularly produce more than speech that contains sounds that they rarely produce. If you agree to participate, a researcher will visit your home a number of times to record both you and your baby interacting in normal play activities. These visits will be on a weekly basis and will last for about 45 minutes. During the home visits you and your child will be asked to wear a wireless microphone (the child’s microphone will be hidden in a special vest). You will be audio- and video-recorded just playing together. Afterwards your and your baby’s speech will be transcribed and analysed. We will then ask you to visit the University of York Infant and Toddler Language Studies Laboratory for one last session when your child has begun producing a favourite speech sound like a “b”. Your child will be seated on your lap while different types of speech are presented through loudspeakers, and your child’s response to this speech will be observed and video-recorded. You will be asked to wear headphones playing speech sounds to mask the speech your child is hearing, so that your response will not influence your child’s response in any way. After this we will audio and video-record you and your child playing together in the lab for 30 minutes, just like in the home recordings. So whilst the experiment only takes a few minutes, the session at the University will last approximately an hour, owing to the filming session. You will be paid £10 for each home visit and £20 for the University visit. |
Psychological significance of production templates in phonological and lexical advance: A cross-linguistic study |
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| This is a study funded by the ESRC. It will run until Autumn 2010 and will study children learning English, French and Arabic. We will be working with colleagues elsewhere in the UK, in France and in the Lebanon. We will be looking at the sorts of patterns that toddlers use when listening to and producing words. We will follow a small group of children in all three countries over the course of a year, recording and transcribing their speech. We will also be asking a larger group of 24-month-old children in York to participate in some experiments with us here at the university. One experiment will involve reading and talking about a picture book. The other will involve a game where the child arranges some toys in a set of boxes. The children taking part in the experiments will also have at least one home visit for a recording session before they come to the university. |
3. British and American Cultural Impact study: |
This study aims to find out at what age British and American infants begin to be able to recognise words embedded within a sentence. We have observed in the past that American babies seem to be able to do this earlier than British babies and we have received a year's worth of research funding from the ESRC to try and work out why. We think it may have something to do with differences between how parents interact with their children in Britain and America. We will be working together with our colleagues at James Madison University on this project. For most families, this study involves one short trip to the University when your baby is between 8 and 10.5 months of age. Your child sits on your lap in a large booth while different words and sentences are played through loudspeakers. We observe and video your child's response to the speech. The experiment takes just a few minutes. To compare how British and American parents interact with their babies, we will also ask some families with 8-month-old babies to borrow a special digital recording device called LENA from us. LENA (LanguageEnvironmentAnalysis) records the speech that babies hear during their waking hours. As well as capturing spontaneous interactions between parents and babies during the recording period (usually over a weekend), we will also ask families to perform certain tasks with their babies, such as telling a story from a picture book. We will be looking at things like intonation patterns, the length of sentences, the number of different words and the total amount of speech that the babies hear. |
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4. Longitudinal Head Turn study |
Conducting longitudinal research using the Head Turn technique:
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5. Familiar Word Segmentation |
Form And Meaning In Infant Word RecognitionHow easy is it for infants to recognise words within sentences? This is an important skill for vocabulary building and eventual production of first words. This study asked when an infant is able to “segment” words that they already recognise from everyday exposure (words like “mummy” and “baby”). This is a pretty difficult task since it relies upon the infants already having a stable memory for the way a word sounds before they come to the baby lab. In previous studies we have shown that infants recognise isolated words by 11 months of age, so we originally expected the skill to emerge only at 12 months. Surprisingly, we found that although the ability to segment these words from sentences was not present at 10 months, there was already some evidence for it at 11 months of age, and very strong evidence for it at 12 months of age. So at around the same time that babies begin to recognise words on their own, they are also able to pick out those words from running speech. We are now investigating more 12 month olds in order to replicate these results. We have now finished this study. |
6. Late talking toddlers: |
This study (funded by the ESRC) concerns the relationship between phonological development (knowledge about the sound patterns of language) and word learning. We include in our study English-learning toddlers of 2.5 years of age who understand spoken language in an age-appropriate way but who are late at starting to use words. We will be making a comparison of the progress in language learning, over a full year, of this group of ‘late talkers’ with a group of English-speaking children whom we have already recorded, and whose language development is typical for their age. We are hoping to use the results of the study to understand the relationship between mastering the sound system of one’s own language and developing an adult-like vocabulary. This study involves us filming the children at home at regular intervals. At various stages we carry out standard developmental and language tests with the children. We have now finished this study. |
7. Babbling Babies |
Dynamic interactions between perception and production:An integrated experimental and observational study |
The study (funded by the ESRC) concerns the relationships between advances in different aspects of language development in infancy: infants’ perception of speech (what they recognise when hearing speech, or what they remember from it), early speech-like sounds that infants produce (babble) and, a little later, the beginning of actual word use. We include in our study 60 English-learning infants of 9 months of age who live within a 20-minute driving radius of the University campus. We follow the babies through to the age of 18 months. This study involves us going to the babies' houses to film them at play, initially on a weekly and then on a monthly basis. They also come to the lab at the University for short speech perception experiments at ages 10 and 11 months. We will use the findings of the study to help us to understand how infants’ experience with producing babble may influence the way that they attend to and remember the speech that they hear. In addition, the findings should give us a better understanding of how babbling itself as well as listening or attending to speech may influence word learning and use. We have now finished this study. |
