We have long proposed that infants figure out who and what to learn from by tuning into people and behaviors that are contingently responsive to infants’ own actions (in this case, babbling). This would explain how social behaviors, like language, are prioritized and rapidly learned over the many other sources of stimulation in infants’ environments. […]
Congratulations to two of our undergraduate research assistants, Sneha Singhi and David Behdad, for completing their first summer of research in our lab with support from the Nexus Scholar Program. Sneha and David helped run a new vocal learning study in the lab, analyzed parent’s infant-directed speech, and recruited participants in the community and from […]
How we respond to infant babbling matters! Previous work from our lab shows that vocal learning is facilitated by moments when infants receive contingent responses to their babbling. What do protoconversations between prelinguistic infants and caregivers look like? Our lab’s newest papers on vocal turn-taking interactions between infants and their caregivers show that caregivers respond […]
Our new theory paper, Curiosity constructs communicative competence through social feedback loops, is out in Advances in Child Development and Behavior! Humans are vocal learners, meaning we can flexibly adapt our vocalizations as a function of hearing other human’s vocalizations. We put the regularities of caregiver-infant social interactions at the forefront of our theory of […]
Dear Parents, We at the B.A.B.Y. Lab are thrilled to introduce an exciting new collaboration between Cornell’s developmental labs – LiLaC, or the Lifespan Labs at Cornell! LiLaC is a collection of labs that study the different stages of human development, from the earliest moments of infancy and childhood to adolescence and adulthood. Together, we […]
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 […]
We are happy to announce that the BABY Lab is now inviting families back into our playroom! When Cornell’s campus closed in March of 2020, we found new ways to ask questions about the development of communication and social learning. Since 2019, we published exciting work on how infants elicit simplified speech from their caregivers […]
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 […]