What helps babies find words?

Language learning takes place in interaction. Infants and parents communicate with each other using linguistic and non-linguistic clues. This project investigates the role that three socio-emotional factors play in infants' language learning.

These three factors are:

1. Feeling in parents' child-oriented speech
2. Familiarity with the parent's voice
3. Face-to-face interaction

If emotion in parents' speech affects language learning, this should happen early, as it is towards three-month-old infants parents put most positive emotion in their voice. Six-month-old infants recognize many common words pronounced by the familiar voice of the parent but not when they are said by a voice unknown to the child. Infant word learning is facilitated by the feedback that face-to-face interaction provides over one-way communication such as a video recording.

The researchers, led by Iris-Corinna Schwarz, will investigate the role of the three socio-emotional factors in early language development by studying experimentally how they affect speech segmentation in infants.

Speech segmentation is the process of identifying words in a spoken utterance, that is “cutting out” a word from the utterance as a whole and saving it. In order to investigate speech segmentation in infants, the researchers will use EEG to measure children’s electrophysiological brain responses, the so-called word recognition effect. The word recognition effect has a typical curve in infants from the age of six months and is linked to language learning as it is related to children's vocabulary development.

The researchers want to give a coherent picture of how infants during their first year of life manage to segment words from the speech flow and how much their speech segmentation ability is affected by the three socio-emotional factors included in the project. This is expected to contribute central and new knowledge about the importance of socio-emotional factors in interactive language learning during infancy.