Research project Parent affect in infant-directed speech and its role in language learning (PALL)

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.