Agency, active learning, and contingencies in early language development

WiRe Postdoctoral Fellowship

Funding Period: 2024

This project aims to investigate the dynamic and mutual interplay between social contingencies, agency, and active learning in early language development. Much prior work has investigated the relationship between caregivers’ input and children’s language uptake. Yet less attention has been devoted to understanding children’s active contribution to their language development and the dynamic interactions that shape learning. Across two studies, targeting different age groups and using different methods, this project examines the mechanisms that support language development in infancy and early childhood. Study 1 is concerned with experimentally investigating the effects of social contingencies on infants’ vocalizations. The implementation of a modified version of the mobile paradigm will enable us to assess infants’ emerging agency through their vocalizations. This will inform us about infants’ developing understanding of the effects of their vocalizations, which has important cascading effects on language and communicative development. Study 2 is a corpus-based investigation seeking to understand the contribution of children’s active soliciting of information to their word learning. The corpus consists of video recordings of semi-naturalistic shared reading interactions, word learning measures, and background information. We will examine whether children’s question asking contributes to their word learning above and beyond caregivers’ provision of scaffolds in extra-textual talk. Taken together, these two studies will shed new light on infants’ and children’s active role in shaping their learning environment and, in turn, their language development.