Current studies
We always have several ongoing studies running in our labs. Below you can find information about each one.
How do baby brains respond to speech sounds?
During the first year of life, babies are already learning their language. This research line is aimed at studying which speech sounds capture the babies' attention the most during different learning phases.
This ‘speech attention’ changes during the first year from quite broad to more native language-specific.
To measure this, we use behavioral techniques as well as EEG; a baby-friendly method to measure brain responses. Ultimately, we aim to discover how and why children learn at different speeds and if we can detect delays or disorders at an early stage.
Processing social information in infants’ brain
Babies are constantly surrounded by social stimuli. Making sense of these social stimuli is important for the social and cognitive development of a child.
For example, specific brain regions in the baby brain are specialized to process various facial expressions and hand gestures from a very early age. This allows babies to understand the emotions and intentions of others.
In the current study, we investigate whether six to eight months old babies can recognize human movement patterns and distinguish them from mechanical movements. Which brain regions are specialized in processing human movements? Does the same region respond when human movements are depicted in an abstract form, such as by moving dots?
We hope to answer these questions with fNIRS, a non-invasive and baby friendly device that measures brain activity with infrared light.
Many Babies 2: “Theory of mind”
This is a collaborative study involving many babylabs around the word. In this study we investigate whether 2-3-year-olds are able to anticipate the behavior of a character by taking into account what this character knows or does not know about the situation. Your child sits in your lap and is shown cartoon animations in which one of the characters hides and the other tries to find him. The one who searches sometimes does know that the other changed his location. By using an eye-tracker we will be able to see whether your child would look at the location where s/he expects the character should search.
How babies learn to understand different sounds/tones in the language
In this study, we want to understand how babies learn to understand the different sounds that make up words in other languages. We will be studying babies who are 4.5 and 10 months old. During the study, your baby will sit on your lap and listen to a series of sounds that change in tone.
We will use a NIRS headgear that shines light onto your baby's head and measures brain activity. This is a safe and non-invasive way to study brain development in babies. By learning more about how babies process these sounds, we can better understand how their brains develop and how they learn a language.
PerPLex: Perception and Production of Lexical items
You may have noticed that sometimes your toddler says words differently than you would do. For example: ‘tuck’ instead of ‘truck’. But why do toddlers do this? Is it a mispronunciation, as would be the case with adults? Or have they not yet completely perceived and thus incorrectly memorized that word (in the mental dictionary)? Or are they not capable yet of properly pronouncing all the sounds involved due to incomplete production?
To recognize a mispronunciation, a word must already be learned correctly through the speech perception system. To correct it, the speech production system must be able to properly pronounce a word. Both systems consist of multiple steps, so knowledge must be acquired and applied on several levels simultaneously. Sometimes toddlers may have a hard time dealing with this.
By observing if and how they handle mispronunciations we can learn a lot about whether we deal with either actual mispronunciations or the result of incomplete perception or incomplete production. The PerPLex project, a collaboration with the Radboud University Nijmegen, investigates why children between 2 and 3 years old make such types of mistakes. Specifically, we are curious about self-monitoring in these children, i.e., the extent to which they themselves (can) adjust their speech when they "mispronounce" something.
The study consists of multiple parts. First, a few standardized tests determine which words your toddler can recognize and speak. Then, a series of tasks are presented in the lab spread over two visits. From language games with your toddler where mispronunciations are provoked, we can analyze (the degree of) self-correction. In addition, your toddler will watch some videos while an eye tracker measures what your child looks at when pictures are named. In this way, the extent to which toddlers recognize the different words using their perception system can be analyzed.