Research seminar: The MINT team

Challenges ahead: how to identify roots of development in First Language Acquisition?

Seminar

Date:

Thursday 6 March 2025

Time:

15.00 – 16.30

Location:

C307, Södra huset

The MINT-projects have been running since November/December 2013, when the 85 involved families had a three-month-old child. The families (parent-child) visited us every 3rd month during the first three years, and then every 6th month until 5 y o a, to be recorded while interacting with their child, parents filled in questionnaires, the children were assessed for language and communication developmental aspects, etc. Follow-up assessments were also done at 7 and 11 y o a. Now, soon 12 years later, we have a rich data base with all kinds of potentially important information on the approximately 65 children who have remained in the project, and their developmental processes from 0;3 to 11;0 years of age.

In MINT3, the current project (funded by MAW), we strive to investigate the individual trajectories for these children. The background is that through the many small-scale studies that have been conducted on various parts of the data, a common finding is that children differ a lot. Using the standardized test of, for example, productive and receptive vocabulary (SCDI), a child with high scores at 1;6 y o a, might be in the middle spectrum two years later while a child with very low scores early on, suddenly makes rapid progress and leads the group at later ages. This spread and inconsistent changes in behavior becomes a problem when we analyze children on group level based on their age in months. The aim of MINT3 is thus to investigate the children as individuals and try to identify common patterns related to their different scores in e.g., vocabulary. At our disposal we have the dyads behaviors in a number of areas (gestural, eye-gaze, touch, facial expression, vocal/verbal, context), interaction patterns (e.g., JA, imitation) as well as background information such as SES, daycare attendance, siblings, languages spoken/heard, health aspects, etc.

To use the extensive data, we have to prepare it through annotations and transcriptions of the video- and audio-files. This work is tremendously time consuming. In MINT3 we thus strive to find some variables – out of the many possible – which we can concentrate our efforts on.  

In the talk we will address these different variables based on what is known from the literature and – hopefully with the help of the audience – discuss which behaviors we should zoom-in on in our work and what ages that might be most important for the different variables.