Research project MINT: The role of interaction and parental input in the language acquisition process
The MINT project investigates how interaction behaviors of children and parents affect the child's language development. From 2013 to 2020, the project followed around 70 children from infancy up to the age of seven.
The MINT project is a longitudinal study of language acquisition and the role interaction and parental input plays in the process. Through the years 2013 to 2020, starting when the children were 3 months old, 70 child-parent dyads were recorded continuously while interacting. The interactional behaviors in focus has been verbal and vocal utterances, gestures, facial expressions, gaze behavior, and touch. In addition, vocabulary, executive functions, narrative skills and working memory were assessed. By analysing both child and parent for an extended period of time, we are able to address questions such as which behaviors promote language acquisition, what individual differences are there, and what role does parental input play for the child's later language competence.
Project description
How do children acquire language? The question has been around as long as we have records but we are still far from a complete understanding of the process and what abilities are needed to promote it. However, some areas are better understood than others. Thus, we know quite a lot about children's verbal development during the first years of life, that the child needs speakers to interact with, who responds verbally (or by signlanguage) to him/her, and who supports him/her in some linguistic manner. During the past decades we have also learned that other modalities than the verbal/vocal are engaged in the acquisition. Gaze behavior, gestures and touch during the child's first year appears to inform the child's vocabulary many years later. In parallell to studies of language acquisition, psychologist have been able to show complext interactions between language and other cognitive abilities like attention, working memory, as well as symbolic play and imitiaton. How these abilities interact is still not understood, does language promote other abilities, does the relation go the opposite way, or is there some third possible way?
Parent-child interaction was recorded every three months from the time the participating children were 3 months old until they turned 4
In the MINT project, these questions are the foci of study as we follow the development between 3 months and 7 years of age for 70 children. The material consist of video recordings with three months intervals between 0;3 and 4;0 yoa, with follow-up recordings when the children were 5 and 7 years old. In the recordings, child and parent interacted in a studio at Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University. The instructions was to play "freely", using some age adequate toys. Three stationary cameras and an InAction-kamera placed on the parent's chest recorded the sessions and separate microphones on each individual was used for good sound recording. Each child was further assessed continuously with regard to vocabulary, working memory, attention, imitation, and symbolic play-skills. Parents completed the SCDI (Swedish version of Child Development Inventory) between the ages 0;9 to 4;0, and provided information on family situation, income, education, siblings, and language spoken, etc. At the follow-up recordings, narrative skills and interacional behavior with someone other than a parent was assessed. The video recordings were transcribed and the material is annotated for both the child's and the parent's following behaviors: vocal/verbal, gestural, gaze, facial expression/mood, touch, and the activities they engaged in. The database consists of these transcribed and annotated files which enables statistical analyses of large amount of data. While most of the files are ready for use, the transciption and annotation of the material is ongoing.
We now address the same old question ’How do children acquire language?’ but with the possibilty to find new answers
In sum, we have the possibility to address questions hitherto difficult to investigate as large, longitudinal, and multimodal datasets are rare and extremely time consuming to produce. The continuous assessment of the children's general development adds to the richness of the data and we now address the same old question "How do children acquire language?" but with the possibilty to find new answers.
Project members
Project managers
Tove Nilsson Gerholm
Senior lecturer, Docent
Members
Lisa Gustavsson
Associate Professor
Iris-Corinna Schwarz
Docent, studierektor
Gláucia Laís Salomão
Researcher
Petter Kallioinen
PhD Student (guest), Research assistant
Stina Andersson
PhD student
Elin Fryleskog
Research assistent
Publications
Publications and presentations:
More about this project
The project was funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (2001.0070) and the Swedish Research Council (2018-01135).