Babbling elicits learnable language from caregivers
How do languages become learnable for young children? Our latest study, “Immature vocalizations elicit simplified adult speech across multiple languages,” is now out in Current... Read More
Timing is everything: Our new paper shows that contingency enables learning from an artificial agent
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 w... Read More
Our summer Nexus Scholar students featured in College of Arts and Sciences article
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. Sn... Read More
Keeping the (proto)conversation going: Our new vocal turn-taking papers highlight the benefits of responding to babbling.
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 protoconv... Read More
Our new theory paper on how infants learn and communicate
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 flexi... Read More
Meet Lifespan Labs at Cornell (LiLaC)!
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 col... Read More
B.A.B.Y. Lab at the Sciencenter!
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 devel... Read More
New paper in Developmental Science
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 ... Read More