Identifying the role of sensorimotor feedback as a mechanism for language learning in the first three years of life

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Language abilities by age 3 predict a child's later academic achievements. This offers an important opportunity to narrow theachievement gap between children from richer and poorer homes: by finding ways to expand a child's vocabulary, those from lower-incomehomes may have better life chances. This has led to an emphasis on vocabulary development research, which shows a clearlink between a child's early language environment and their later vocabulary. However, interventions reveal that this problem is noteasy to resolve; by the second year, positive changes to the linguistic environment do not have any clear effects on a child'svocabulary. By age 1, the foundation may already have been set for a child's future language skills; to address the word gap problem afocus-shift is required towards vocal development during the first year of life. The proposed research offers a novel perspective thatemphasises this period as a crucial window for learning even before an infant has begun to speak. This is due to the role ofsensorimotor feedback: a network of simultaneous sensory events that occur when infants vocalize, including proprioception,muscular function, and auditory input. These sensorimotor events, or mappings, may offer a rich learning opportunity that has as-yetuntapped potential in understanding how infants learn to talk. This research presents a new framework for understanding languagedevelopment through a focus on sensorimotor feedback, which may be a key missing link between the language a child hears in thehome and their vocabulary by school-age. A combination of naturalistic and experimental data will present a novel view ofsensorimotor feedback in relation to 1) the early environment and 2) later vocabulary, drawing on advanced methods in phoneticsand developmental psychology to propose a new framework for understanding how infants learn and, subsequently, addressing theachievement gap.