A key aim to our work is to understand early language, literacy, and communicative development in social context. How do infants change in their skills from infancy through early childhood? How do parents scaffold infant learning across the first years of life? In a typical study, we videorecord infants and parents interacting during everyday home routines or structured tasks, such as playing with toys, eating meals, and sharing books. We examine language and communicative behaviors in infants, inputs from parents, and the activity context of interactions, thus documenting reciprocal influences between babies’ emerging skills and their social experiences and contexts. We apply detailed and time-locked coding to the behaviors of infants—such as by marking their looks, vocalizations/language, and gestures in real time—and in parents—such as noting the timing of their contingent verbal responding, the types of words they direct to infants, and the functions of language inputs, such as questioning or labelling.
Play and Language Lab