Collaborative Research: The temporal structure of infants' everyday behaviors: Language and play interactions in the home environment

在婴儿期和蹒跚学步期，孩子们在说自己语言的声音和单词方面表现出令人印象深刻的进步。重要的是，个体婴儿在早期语言技能上存在巨大差异，这种差异关系到入学准备、学业成就，甚至后来的健康和幸福。因此，了解有助于语言学习的早期互动的特征对科学、实践和整个社会都至关重要。迄今为止，大多数关于婴儿语言发展的研究都集中在父母对婴儿说的话的数量和种类上。这个项目的前提是越多不一定越好，它调查了日常互动的一个潜在的关键特征：婴儿和母亲的行为是如何随着时间的推移而发展的。该项目是第一个测试行为的时间结构（例如，闲聊的时刻之后是休息时间；在早上的物体游戏中几次来回的谈话）如何促进婴儿声音和单词生成的复杂性的项目。从这个项目中获得的基础知识有望激发语言发展的新理论，并为测量人类日常行为的时间特性提供新的工具。该项目基于对150多个家庭的400多个小时的母婴家庭活动的录像语料库的转录、编码和分析。目的1描述了婴儿在日常家庭活动中发声和母亲说话的时间结构。目的2测试婴儿和母亲在时刻到时刻和延长时间尺度上的发声行为之间的联系。目的3检验婴儿客体游戏的时间结构与婴儿发声和母亲言语的时间结构之间的关系。目的4研究婴儿发声的时间结构、母亲的言语和婴儿客体的共同作用与婴儿发声和词语的复杂程度之间的关系。对时间结构的关注改变了早期语言发展的研究，将重点从基于简短实验室任务的行为快照转移到研究行为如何在家庭环境中展开。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Children show impressive gains in saying the sounds and words of their language(s) during infancy and toddlerhood. Importantly, individual infants differ enormously in their early language skills, and such differences matter for school readiness, academic achievement, and even later health and wellbeing. Thus, understanding the features of early interactions that contribute to language learning is critical to science, practice, and society at large. To date, most research on infant language development focuses on the amount and variety of words that parents direct to their babies. This project, grounded in the premise that more is not necessarily better, investigates a potentially critical feature of everyday interactions: How behaviors of infant and mother unfold over time. The project is the first to test how the temporal structure of behaviors (e.g., chatty moments followed by downtime; several bouts of back-and-forth conversations during a morning’s object play episodes) contribute to the sophistication of infants’ sound and word production. The foundational knowledge gained from this project promises to inspire new theories of language development and provide new tools for measuring temporal properties of everyday human behaviors. The project is based on the transcription, coding, and analysis of a videorecorded corpus of 400+ hours of infant-mother home activities in a diverse sample of over 150 families. Aim 1 describes the temporal structure of infants’ vocalizations and mothers’ speech during everyday home activities. Aim 2 tests associations between infant and mother vocal behaviors at moment-to-moment and extended time scales. Aim 3 tests how the temporal structure of infant object play relates to the temporal structure of infants’ vocalizations and mothers’ speech. Aim 4 examines how the temporal structures of infants’ vocalizations, mothers’ speech, and infant object play together relate to the sophistication of infants’ vocal productions of sounds and words. The focus on temporal structure transforms the study of early language development by shifting emphasis from snapshots of behavior based on brief lab tasks to studying how behaviors unfold during activities in the home environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.