Collaborative Research: The temporal structure of infants' everyday behaviors: Language and play interactions in the home environment

Children show impressive gains in saying the sounds and words of their language(s) during infancy and toddlerhood. Importantly, individual infants differ enormously in their early language skills, and such differences matter for school readiness, academic achievement, and even later health and wellbeing. Thus, understanding the features of early interactions that contribute to language learning is critical to science, practice, and society at large.

To date, most research on infant language development focuses on the amount and variety of words that parents direct to their babies. This project, grounded in the premise that more is not necessarily better, investigates a potentially critical feature of everyday interactions: How behaviors of infant and mother unfold over time. The project is the first to test how the temporal structure of behaviors (e.g., chatty moments followed by downtime; several bouts of back-and-forth conversations during a morning’s object play episodes) contribute to the sophistication of infants’ sound and word production.

The foundational knowledge gained from this project promises to inspire new theories of language development and provide new tools for measuring temporal properties of everyday human behaviors.

The project is based on the transcription, coding, and analysis of a videorecorded corpus of 400+ hours of infant-mother home activities in a diverse sample of over 150 families. Aim 1 describes the temporal structure of infants’ vocalizations and mothers’ speech during everyday home activities. Aim 2 tests associations between infant and mother vocal behaviors at moment-to-moment and extended time scales.

Aim 3 tests how the temporal structure of infant object play relates to the temporal structure of infants’ vocalizations and mothers’ speech. Aim 4 examines how the temporal structures of infants’ vocalizations, mothers’ speech, and infant object play together relate to the sophistication of infants’ vocal productions of sounds and words. The focus on temporal structure transforms the study of early language development by shifting emphasis from snapshots of behavior based on brief lab tasks to studying how behaviors unfold during activities in the home environment.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.