Study title

Eyetracking data collected from 10-month-old infants, stimuli. In the current study, parents read their infants a storybook containing multiple exemplars from two novel object categories twice a day, every day for a week. Importantly, one category was labelled while the other was not. After the training week, infants took part in a hybrid familiarization / preferential looking task. In the familiarization phase, infants saw individual images of the trained objects presented in silence. Here, we hypothesized that if shared labels render category structure more similar, looking times to the labeled and unlabeled objects should differ in these silent trials. In the preferential looking phase, infants saw the objects presented side-by-side and heard the trained label.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 children learn to talk? Answering these questions is a major challenge for researchers. LuCiD will bring together researchers from a wide range of different backgrounds to address this challenge. The LuCiD Centre will be based in the North West of England and will coordinate five streams of research in the UK and abroad. It will use multiple methods to address central issues,...