Study title

How preverbal infants perceive and process events can provide important insights into the conceptual foundations of language development. To establish mappings between event representations and the linguistic means of expressing them, infants must encode semantic components such as roles, identities, and causal relations between event participants (i.e. who is doing what to whom). The current project investigated infants’ processing of causal events and its relationship with language learning. The same group of infants was tested at two time points, once at around 13-months-old and again at 30-months, in multiple experiments at each time point. The experiments were designed to be independently as well as longitudinally informative, and included eye tracking, behavioural, and parental-questionnaire measures. All participants were healthy, typically-developing, full-term infants, and all experiments took place in an infant research lab. All experimental measures were within-participant designs. A total of 50 infants took part in the first phase of the project, and of this group 43 returned to take part in the second phase of the project.The International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD) will bring about a transformation in our understanding of how children learn to communicate, and deliver the crucial information needed to design effective interventions in child healthcare, communicative development and early years education. Learning to use language to communicate is hugely important for society. Failure to develop language and communication skills at the right age is a major predictor of educational and social inequality in later life. To tackle this problem, we need to know the answers to a number of questions: How do children learn language from what they see and hear? What do measures of children's brain activity tell us about what they know? and How do differences between children and differences in their environments affect how...