Last Friday, I came across this great resource for academics and parents interested in how children actually learn languages: the Princeton Baby Lab! For academics, they offer a particular treasure: they make all of their publications publicly available here.
What is a baby lab?
Oftentimes when people hear laboratory, images from some dark science fiction movies pop up in their heads featuring scientists in white robes doing secret experiments on people. Well, as a research scientist myself, I can assure you: NO! THAT’S FAR FROM IT! Baby labs are usually part of a university. The baby lab in Princeton, for example, is part of the psychology department at Princeton University. They research how children—both monolingual and bilingual—learn languages. They use non-invasive methods. That means, they play games with the kids, observe them interact with others, they interview parents, and use cool new technology such as eye-tracking which allows you to follow in detail what someone is looking at at a certain moment in time. Overall, researchers in baby labs found out some cool stuff!
Did you know that …?
… babies use what is called “statistical learning” to learn words from their parents’ speech. Picture yourself listening to someone speaking a foreign language to you. How do you know what sounds actually make a word? The situation is similar for children. So their minds use a technique called “statistical learning.” They notice which sounds occur frequently and go together in a language (e.g., ba-by) and which ones do not (e.g., ‘kryz’ in English).
… a mom’s voice has a unique sound fingerprint (so called timbre) when she speaks with her child. When we speak with an adult our voice has a different timbre or sound quality than when we turn around to speak with our little one. Basically, we have a natural, unique way that our voice vibrates when we speak with our child. This helps children learn language.
I got in touch with them on Friday and they called me back immediately. They are open to visits to the lab if you want to find out more about how that type of research works or even consider participating in one of their studies. Ella and I have signed up and will participate if they have a study that fits our language background!
Source of image featured in this post: https://www.facebook.com/princetonbabylab/
