Previous research at the Oxford Babylab

When do infants first understand/produce words?
How do children discover the meanings of words?
When do children begin to pay attention to word endings?
What do children know about the sounds that make up the words they know?
How do infants form categories?
How do infants learn to discriminate objects in their visual environment?

Children's vocabulary develops with great ease and speed - some estimates say that 5 to 10 new words are learned every day between birth and six years. A popular method for following this developmental progression is to ask parents to record the words their children produce and understand. Parents who volunteer to participate in a BabyLab study may be asked to complete a vocabulary questionnaire before they come. The Oxford CDI (Communicative Development Inventory) has been adapted from the MacArthur CDI, an American English vocabulary inventory.

The Oxford Communicative Development Inventory

Previous research in the BabyLab has shown that infants can learn the connection between a picture of an object and a new label after the two have been presented together only a few times. Such studies usually present just one object while the infant hears the new word, making it easy for infants to know which object the new word labels. However, when children hear new words in their home environment, a range of objects will typically be present. How do they discover the appropriate meaning of the word? Do infants pay attention to which object the speaker is looking at when they utter the new word, and assume that the word must label that object? Do they focus on the most interesting object around, and assume that the word labels that? These are some of the questions that we are researching at the BabyLab at the moment.

Schafer, G., & Plunkett, K. (1998). Rapid word learning by 15-month-olds under tightly-controlled conditions. Child Development, 69, 309-320.

Schafer, G., Plunkett, K., & Harris, P. L. (1999). What's in a name? Lexical knowledge drives infants' visual preferences in the absence of referential input. Developmental Science, 2, 188-195.

In English, we sometimes add sounds to the end of a word to modify its meaning. For example, changing the word 'cat' to 'cats' tells other people we are talking about more than one cat, whilst changing the word 'walk' to 'walked' tells people we are talking about an action that happened in the past. Some of the current studies in the BabyLab examine children's sensitivity to such endings. We are trying to find out if they hear the difference between the singular and the plural, and when they begin to understand what this means.

Words are made up of sequences of sounds, which are linked to one or more meanings. To learn a word, children must be able to detect and recognise this sound sequence, in association with the correct meaning. This is an impressive task, since individual sounds are not always pronounced in the same way - even when the same person is talking! So children must be able to discriminate between words that may only differ by one sound - for example, "ball" and "doll", at the same time as they allow for changing pronunciations. Some of the current studies in the BabyLab are investigating the detail children use in their sound representations of words, and considering how these representations change as the child develops, and as the word becomes more familiar.

We aim to give some answers to this question by studying the principal properties infants from 12 to 24 months old consider to build categories of animate and inanimate entities.

These properties include perceptual characteristics such as shape, size, colour, texture, pattern, external and internal components; as well as motion. Our experiments manipulate these properties by presenting diverse types of single and combined modifications, in order to observe how infants' categorisation is affected by such changes.

The experimental paradigm we are using in our BabyLab, preferential looking technique, allows us to introduce the baby to different types of objects and events, familiar or unfamiliar. Therefore, we can study the categories infants form when objects and words they know are presented, as well as when they perceive unknown objects and listen to unknown words.

Combining the presentation of visual stimuli that change their properties, with absence and presence of words, will allow us to appreciate how language participates into the process of categorisation.

Objects and their infant observers are often in motion through their environment. This means that the objects that infants see are very often changing in shape and size as their orientations and distances from their observers change. How then can infants learn to recognise and sort their environment, when the visual information they are receiving is in flux? We are undertaking a programme of research to investigate the ability of young infants to make use of different kinds of cues when observing their visual environment. In particular we have demonstrated that infants are able to remember particular locations within an object, even when that object is presented in a new orientation.

Bremner, A. J., Bryant, P. E., & Rogers, B. J. (2002). Young infants' use of spatial frameworks in their perception of objects. Paper submitted as part of a symposium entitled: The development of spatial frameworks in early infancy. Chaired by Jordy Kaufman and Andrew Bremner. Submitted to The XIIIth Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Toronto, Canada, April 2002.