The lab will be at the Sciencenter in Ithaca on Saturday, February 25 at 2 pm for an afternoon of parent-child activities. Let’s build together! We will to share their work on infant and child development through a tower building activity for families. Parents and children will help each other build a tower with spaghetti […]
What are the origins of vocal communication in human infants? In our new paper in Developmental Science, we find that a crucial building block of communicative development is learning that one’s voice has the power to influence others. We show that communicative development originates in adults’ responses to babbling. As infants (2- and 5-month-olds) realize that […]
The latest paper from our lab is out in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. We review how babies learn from visual, auditory, and tactile perception, and extend those findings to illustrate mechanisms by which infants learn from social interactions. We focus on the statistical regularities that emerge in the moment-by-moment behaviors observed in studies […]
It’s been a busy week for the B.A.B.Y. lab! Our paper yesterday in Current Biology demonstrated how social feedback guides song learning in birds. Our new paper, led by Gina Mason, is out today in Infancy. We show how social interactions organize attention in five-month-old human infants. Using a naturalistic play paradigm, we found that […]
The latest paper from our lab is out in Current Biology. In the field of birdsong learning, most researchers focus on male singers rather than females, who in many species don’t sing. Our work shows that females play a crucial role in guiding song learning with rapid nonvocal gestures that are used by young males […]
Rachel Albert, a B.A.B.Y. lab Ph.D now at Lebanon Valley College, recently authored an article in Scientific American on our recent findings from a study on parental responses to infant babbling. In the study, we asked mothers to react to audio and video clips of unfamiliar infants engaged in babbling. We found that infants who babbled […]
A new article in Science Daily reports on our recent discoveries about the social functions of infant babbling. Traditionally, baby babbling was thought of as simple motor exercise, but we have found that babbling plays a crucial role in the development of communication and language. In our new paper published in Developmental Science, we asked […]
A new article in the Cornell Chronicle reports on our latest paper investigating the role of social motivation in learning how to communicate. Infant songbirds and humans learn from social feedback to their immature behavior, but the mechanisms linking social motivation to communicative development are unknown. In our new paper published in the Proceedings of the […]
Honors thesis student and all-around wonderful person Sara Schroer is being featured by Cornell as one of our star graduating seniors! Next year she will attend the Ph.D program in developmental psychology at Indiana University.
If someone spoke to you in a high pitched, animated manner, you might be a little confused. This style of talking is known as infant-directed speech (IDS) and is characterized by high pitch, slower tempo, tonal variation, and simplified language. But why do parents naturally use this speech with their children? As science has shown, IDS is […]