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York BabyLab Studies

Phonological Development: Perception & Production

Infant and Toddler Studies

York is a leading centre for research and teaching in phonetics and phonology, in first and second language acquisition.

Our team specialises in the study of phonological development. Our research focuses on infants and toddlers, including observational studies of production and experimental studies of word recognition and word learning. We study the relationship between babble and early words, and the shaping of a child's knowledge of the sound system of the language they are learning. We also study how the speech of the adults around them affects infants' learning.

Research in phonological development

How do babies learn to talk?

In the York BabyLab we study many different aspects of this question. We want to know how much parents’ different ways of talking to their children help the children to learn. We are also interested in how babies’ own babbling, and later, their different ways of forming words affect the way they listen to speech and learn more words.

We study children who are slow to begin speaking, to try to explain why some children catch up quickly while others go on to have long-term language problems. And we are interested in how children remember language, and how this is affected by what they already know and the words they are already using.

We use different methods to study these questions: In some cases we visit babies’ homes to record them, in others the family comes to the lab to perform different tasks. We are learning a lot from these activities – and we think the families enjoy them too, not least the babies, for whom everything is new!

Our research is informed by the following Programmes: 

1. Interactions between perception & production

It has been well established that infants develop knowledge of the patterns of the native language over the course of the first year of life. At the same time, in parallel, vocal development is marked by a critical milestone at about 6-8 months, with the emergence of canonical babbling (e.g., bababa, dadada – the first adult-like syllable production). One of our major interests is the question of when and how these two strands – advances in infants’ perception and production – come together and influence one another.

2. Phonological templates

Although a baby’s first words are often relatively accurate, in the period that follows we typically find a ‘regression’ in accuracy, with the baby’s words tending to become more similar due to the emergence of one or more production routines or ‘word templates’. We are interested in the ways in which these phonological templates first appear and later fade, in how they differ by ambient language and by individual child within a single language group. Another important question is the extent to which these production templates affect the way children process the speech they hear and the way they remember it – a critical part of new word learning. We are also interested in possible clinical applications of the concept.

3. Effects of input on infant language development

Infants have been shown to be attracted to the variable melodic patterns of ‘infant-directed’ input speech, or ‘baby talk’. Although this speech register is thought to be nearly universal, the style of speech used with babies varies from one culture to another and also between families within a single culture. We are interested in learning more about how these differences affect children’s word learning.