We are currently running studies with infants anywhere between 5 and 22 months.

Here’s a description of just a few of the experiments we’re doing right now with different age groups.

6-month-olds: Infants prefer to look at people’s faces, rather than simple geometric shapes. Is this because they have experience interacting with people, or because faces are inherently more interesting? To try and answer this question, we’re asking whether infants also prefer to look at the faces of imaginary animals.

7-month-olds: How do infants begin to understand that words occur in a predictable order in sentences? Why is it OK to say “the dog,” but not “dog the?” Can infants learn these types of rules only for language or in a variety of different domains?

To answer these questions, we use a simple task. Infants are asked to look at a computer screen, where they see a series of colored circles. These circles all follow a particular pattern. Either the same color repeats itself, or it does not. For as long as children are interested in watching these circles, they stay on the screen, so that children get as much time to learn the pattern as they want.

After the infants have finished learning, they get to see circles with new colors. Although the colors are new, they follow the same pattern as the children have learned before. We want to see whether children are interested in the new circles because they have a new color, or whether they have figured out that the pattern is the same, and do not find the new colors as interesting.

13-month-olds: How do infants begin to understand which sounds mean something different? When they hear two people say the same word, can they understand that even though the two people might sound quite different, they are referring to the same object?

In this study we again use the computer to show infants different objects. Each object has its own unique name. Once infants have learned what the name of each object is, we present them with two kinds of test trials. In one kind of trial, they see the object with the name they have heard before. In another kind of test trial, they see the object, but hear a slightly different name. For example, if the object was called “bih” before, it might be called “dih” now. Our question is what kind of changes infants notice, and what kind of changes infants ignore. Figuring out which changes to attend to, and ignore, is an important part of discovering how their language works.

20-month-olds: When we talk to infants and young children (and each other), we most often use sentences, rather than speaking in one word at a time. This presents a challenge for children, because to learn words, they need to be able to separate the individual words from the stream of fluent speech.

One fact that might help infants, though, is that many words refer to visual objects in the world (like the word “dog” refers to four-legged pets that bark). Consistently experiencing words that are paired with objects might make the words in fluent speech easier to spot.

To see if children can take advantage of these kinds of audio-visual regularities, we present them with a stream of fluent speech, made up of novel words. For half of the infants, each of the novel words is paired with an object. The other half hears the speech with no objects. Does one group learn more easily?