NIH. US: If you are a fan of wildlife shows, you’ve probably seen those tiny
video cameras rigged to animals in the wild that provide a sneak peek
into their secret domains. But not all research cams are mounted on
creatures with fur, feathers, or fins. One of NIH’s 2014 Early
Independence Award winners has developed a baby-friendly, head-mounted
camera system (shown above) that captures the world from an infant’s
perspective and explores one of our most human, but still imperfectly
understood, traits: language.
Elika Bergelson, a young researcher at
the University of Rochester in New York, wants to know exactly how and
when infants acquire the ability to understand spoken words. Using
innovative camera gear and other investigative tools, she hopes to
refine current thinking about the natural timeline for language
acquisition. Bergelson also hopes her work will pay off in a firmer
theoretical foundation to help clinicians assess children with poor
verbal skills or with neurodevelopmental conditions that impair
information processing, such as autism spectrum disorders.
Already, Bergelson has made progress
towards building that firmer foundation. In her doctoral work at the
University of Pennsylvania, she and her advisor Daniel Swingley showed
that infants begin understanding words about six months after birth [1].
Until then, many researchers believed that babies were unable to shift
their focus from sounds and syllables to the meaning of words until
about 12 months of age. Using a laboratory-based system that tracked
infants’ eye movements when they were asked to identify common objects
on a computer screen, Bergelson and Swingley found that some 6-month-old
babies could understand, to a certain degree, about a dozen nouns, such
as “apple” or “hair.” This finding might explain why previous research
has shown that children with hearing impairments did better when they
were fitted with cochlear implants at 6 months old, rather than just a
few months later [2].
Next, Bergelson plans to conduct a home-based study of approximately
50 babies to examine in finer detail how sights and sounds get soaked
up—and eventually verbalized—by youngsters ages 6 to 18 months, a
critical period for learning words. In the year-long study, called
Study of Environmental Effects on Developing LINGuistic Skills
(SEEDLingS), parent volunteers will place tiny cameras onto their
babies’ heads for one hour each month and interact with their baby just
like they usually do. In addition to this baby’s eye-view of the world,
Bergelson will also record all of the audio input that the child is
receiving from parents and other people, pets, or devices in the home on
another day each month.
Bergelson will then review the home audiovisual recordings to glean
clues into how seeing and hearing drives a baby’s ability to learn
words. She also will ask parents to bring their children to the
Rochester Baby Lab to participate in experiments that track their eye
movements for familiar object-word pairs, such as “hand” and “bottle.”
The aim is to test how children react to familiar and novel objects
shown on a computer screen and their ability to pair them with known
words and sounds.
As a quick footnote, Bergelson and Noah Simon, a fellow Early
Independence Award winner at the University of Washington in Seattle,
were recently honored in the science component of Forbes “30 Under 30,” an annual list of the most-important young innovators and influencers. Congratulations to them both!
References:
[1] At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Bergelson E, Swingley D. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Feb 28;109(9):3253-8.
[2] Language of early- and later-identified children with hearing loss. Yoshinaga-Itano C, Sedey AL, Coulter DK, Mehl AL. Pediatrics. 1998 Nov;102(5):1161-71.
Links:
Elika Bergelson, University of Rochester, NY
Mechanisms of Word Learning in Infancy, Elika Bergelson, RePORT, NIH
SEEDLingS project, Rochester Baby Lab
NIH Director’s Early Independence Award Program
Forbes 30 Under 30
NIH support: NIH Common Fund