Ongoing Projects
How do objects group together?
In the Babylab, we attempt to identify the kind of information babies use when forming object categories. Are they using attributes (absence/presence of eyes, number of legs, ....), combinations of attributes, overall shape, ...? Does language influence the nature of category formation, and if so, how and from what age? We use a wide range of investigation techniques so as provide answers to these questions.
Word Sounds
Processing of the sound pattern of the language is crucial in the understanding of speech. This processing implies the existence of connections between the sound patterns of word forms and the parts of the brain involved in the representation of their meaning. Proper understanding of these mechanisms and their development trajectories in the early years of life is critical for language development research and is extremely useful for effective treatment of language development disorders.
Our project goes beyond purely behavioural assessment of early language development to a framework more directly related to the neural processes in the brain. We work with the electrical activity generated by the brain as measured by the EEG signal to study the relationship between changes in brain organization and the accuracy of encoding the sounds of words from early infancy to all the way to adult.
Word Learning
When you speak to your child, how do they figure out which words refer to which objects? We are investigating how infants work out the meaning of new words. We know that infants are more likely to select a novel, name-unknown object as the referent of a new word, rather than a familiar, name-known object. Many researchers believe that infants do this because they do not accept more than one name for an object. However, we are investigating the alternative possibility that infants are guided by the novelty of objects; are infants’ biased to associate new words with objects they haven’t seen before?
Word Associations
One way of thinking about how language functions when we listen to speech, is in terms of which words 'go together'. Do we link up words according to how they sound? Or do we connect them up according to their meanings? And are there different systems of organization working together at the same time? We can investigate these types of questions by looking into what words are typically associated with each other, and then testing whether these associations change how we listen to language. For example, if asked about the first word that comes to mind after hearing the word "doctor", a large number of people will say "nurse". We can see that doctor and nurse describe similar professions (a taxonomic relationship). On the other hand, following a word like "yellow" some people might give a response like "hello". In this case the words rhyme with each other (a phonological relationship). By gathering word associations from people in the local community, we can then investigate how different types of associations might influence the way that we access words while we are listening to language. At the BabyLab, Suzy Styles is investigating the typical word associations of young adults, and of the parents of young children in the Oxfordshire area. She also investigates different types of word-level relationship using eye-gaze tasks.
