Research project Parent affect in infant-directed speech and its role in language learning (PALL)
What helps babies find words? This project investigates the role that three socio-emotional factors play in infants' language learning.
![PALL bild](/polopoly_fs/1.627816.1663917805!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/widescreen_690/image.jpg)
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.
The three factors are:
- feeling in parents' child-oriented speech
- familiarity with the parent's voice
- face-to-face interaction.
The researchers will investigate the role of the three socio-emotional factors in early language development by experimentally studying how they affect how infants segment speech flow.
Speech segmentation is the process of identifying words in a spoken utterance, “cutting out” the word from the utterance as a whole and saving it in memory. In order to investigate speech segmentation in infants, the researchers will use EEG to measure children’s electrical brain responses, the so-called word recognition effect. The word recognition effect has a typical shape 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
- how much their speech segmentation ability is affected by the three socio-emotional mentioned above.
This is expected to contribute important and new knowledge about the importance of socio-emotional factors when infants learn language in interaction.
Project members
Project managers
Iris-Corinna Schwarz
Docent, studierektor
![Fotograf: Rickard Kilström Iris-Corinna Schwarz](/polopoly_fs/1.650820.1678891481!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_260/image.jpg)
Members
Ellen Marklund
Docent
![](/webb2021/img/fallback_image_profile.png)
Lisa Gustavsson
Associate Professor
Elisabet Cortes
PhD Student, Research Assistant
![](/webb2021/img/fallback_image_profile.png)
Klara Marklund Hjerpe
Research assistant
![](/webb2021/img/fallback_image_profile.png)
Petter Kallioinen
PhD Student (guest), Research assistant
![](/webb2021/img/fallback_image_profile.png)
David Pagmar
Researcher
![DP_new_ht22](/polopoly_fs/1.624179.1662016113!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_260/image.jpg)
More about this project
This project is funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (MAW 2020.0049).