Welcome to the Baby Language Lab
This lab, started in Fall 2008, is dedicated to understanding the relationship between infants’ everyday language experiences and their language development. We look at what skills infants bring to the task of listening to the language, such as sensitivities to the melodic properties of language, and how these skills influence their ability to learn their first language. Most of our research involves perceptual studies of infants. In these studies, we play sounds and video for infants. By measuring their interest in what they are seeing and hearing, we can learn about what they understand and perceive about the world around them. We also collect recordings of language that infants hear in different environments and analyze different characteristics of those language environments. The Baby Language Lab is also active in ManyBabies, a largescale, worldwide collaborative research program that examines various aspects of infant cognition, such as social and moral reasoning, and responses to novel and familiar items.
We are always looking for volunteers (babies and their parents or guardians) to come into our lab and participate in our studies. With our social evaluation study, we assess infants’ preferences for nice characters over mean characters. This takes about an hour. For other studies, we may do a comprehensive assessment of the languages your child hears, which takes about 30 minutes. You will receive a small gift from us for participating, as well as parking or bus fare reimbursement, and an enjoyable experience in our lab.
Please contact us to learn more. We hope to see you soon!