Identifying the role of sensorimotor feedback as a mechanism for language learning in the first three years of life

Language abilities by age 3 predict a child's later academic achievements. This offers an important opportunity to narrow the

achievement gap between children from richer and poorer homes: by finding ways to expand a child's vocabulary, those from lower-income homes may have better life chances. This has led to an emphasis on vocabulary development research, which shows a clear

link between a child's early language environment and their later vocabulary. However, interventions reveal that this problem is not

easy to resolve; by the second year, positive changes to the linguistic environment do not have any clear effects on a child's

vocabulary. By age 1, the foundation may already have been set for a child's future language skills; to address the word gap problem a

focus-shift is required towards vocal development during the first year of life. The proposed research offers a novel perspective that

emphasises this period as a crucial window for learning even before an infant has begun to speak. This is due to the role of

sensorimotor feedback: a network of simultaneous sensory events that occur when infants vocalize, including proprioception,

muscular function, and auditory input. These sensorimotor events, or mappings, may offer a rich learning opportunity that has as-yet

untapped potential in understanding how infants learn to talk. This research presents a new framework for understanding language

development through a focus on sensorimotor feedback, which may be a key missing link between the language a child hears in the

home and their vocabulary by school-age. A combination of naturalistic and experimental data will present a novel view of

sensorimotor feedback in relation to 1) the early environment and 2) later vocabulary, drawing on advanced methods in phonetics

and developmental psychology to propose a new framework for understanding how infants learn and, subsequently, addressing the achievement gap.