What we do
Memory in infancy
When adults try to remember their childhood, they typically recall virtually nothing from the first few years of life. Infants are obviously learning a lot during this time so why have we forgotten this important time in our lives? Our research examines the way infants learn and remember information from the world around them and their ability to use this knowledge when they encounter new situations.
Example study: Learning from other children and adults
Dental Health
With our colleagues in the University of Sheffield dental school (http://www.shef.ac.uk/dentalschool/research/groups/dph/cyoh), we are interested in the contribution that dental health and healthy eating make to development and quality of life in infancy and childhood. We run studies to investigate how teeth brushing behaviours and routines are introduced, change and develop as children grow. We also study how knowledge of healthy eating impacts on these behaviours as well as infant health more generally.
Language and Communication
Around their first birthdays, infants begin to communicate with people about the world around them. From this point on, they rapidly pick up the language(s) they hear around them. Yet it takes several years for children to become adult like communicators. We run studies to investigate how children learn to talk, why they sometimes find it difficult and what experiences can help them to learn. We also study how good language skills can improve children´s understanding of the world and other people.
Example study 1: Learning to say what you want
Example study 2: A cross-cultural study of narrative development
Learning to talk isn’t just about learning words and stringing them together. A key component of language development involves taking other people’s point of view into account and adapting what you say accordingly. Young children find this hard and often say things their parents can’t understand (e.g., saying ‘I want that one’ when the parent doesn’t know what ‘that one’ is). We have been studying how children learn to produce appropriate referring expressions (e.g., saying ‘that book by the radio’ instead of ‘that one’). The example study above showed that providing children training (by asking them to clarify what they mean) dramatically increases 2- to 4-year-old children’s ability to communicate clearly. Still, little is known about whether and how parents spontaneously help their children learn about this aspect of language.
In a recent project, we have explored how British and Costa Rican parents and their 3- and 5-year olds talk to each other. Children looked at two picture-based story books with an experimenter and later on were asked to tell each of the stories to their parent (who could not see the books). For one book, parents were instructed to interact normally with their children. For the other book, parents were asked to refrain from asking their children questions. When free to ask questions, parents were found to use a variety of strategies to clarify their children’s stories. The next step for this research is to find out which of their strategies is most effective in promoting language development in the home.
British Academy Seminar on Communicative Development
In January 2012, we held a seminar in Sheffield to bring together researchers working on child language from a cross-cultural perspective. The seminar was funded by the British Academy as part of their Latin America Link Programme. Participants came from the UK, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Chile and included Psychologists, Speech & Language Therapists as well as people working in Education and Linguistics. The main points discussed at the seminar were:
How parent-child interactions vary in different cultures. We discussed the ways in which different styles of parenting can affect language development (and the aspects of language development that do not appear to be affected by parenting).
How different cultures take a different approach to diagnosing language disorder
How early vocabulary and the ability to produce a narrative (tell a story or talk about a past event) are good predictors of later language ability and educational success.
How both vocabulary and narrative ability can be promoted by parent-child talk. In particular, reminiscing (where parents talk to their children about things they’ve done together) was discussed as rich form of language that can scaffold children’s learning. Parents from all cultures engage in reminiscing. It was suggested that encouraging parents to increase this kind of talk might be an effective means of promoting language development for all children.
Our latest findings: Experience can change infants' knowledge about faces from other races
Shortly after we are born, we can tell which faces we have seen before, regardless of whether they are from our race, or even our species. During the infancy period, the face processing system becomes ‘tuned’ to the type of faces that we see regularly. So if you grow up in an environment where you only experience a particular type of face (e.g., just Caucasian, just Asian, just African) then your brain begins to specialise in this type of face. By 9 months of age the ability to process other-race faces is typically lost, which makes it difficult for us to identify and discriminate between the faces of people from races other than our own.
In a recent study, our research team demonstrated that exposing Caucasian infants to Chinese faces through perceptual training via picture books for a total of one hour between 6 and 9 months allows Caucasian infants to maintain the ability to discriminate Chinese faces at 9 months of age. These findings show that the development of the processing of face race can be modified by training, highlighting the importance of early experience in shaping the face representation. These findings also reveal that books can be an important source of real world information for young infants.
The scientific report of these results is available here: dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0019858