As babies and toddlers learn language, they also learn to crawl, walk, explore and play. As children’s bodies develop, they actively engage with their world and independently choose what to learn from. The vast majority of what children learn is via this curiosity-based exploration.

Surprisingly, though, the relationship between curiosity-driven learning and language development is currently not well understood. For example, do more curious babies learn more words, and do toddlers with higher vocabularies play with objects in a particular way?

In this work package we answer these questions using existing videos from the LuCiD Language 0-5 Project, which show babies and parents playing with toys together at home. We recorded the actions that babies perform; for example, do they bang their toys together? If so, how often? We associate these measures with their vocabulary size to establish for the first time the relationship between early curiosity-driven play and language development.

The coding and reliability coding has been completed for 40 videos drawn from the Language 0-5 project. These videos consist of free play sessions involving parents and their 11-month-old infants, recorded in the child’s home. Videos were coded for frequency and duration of a range of exploratory motor behaviours (e.g., banging toys, mouthing toys), and the results of this coding will be associated with children’s concurrent vocabulary to establish whether there is a link between curiosity-driven learning and vocabulary size.

We developed a fine-grained coding scheme, based on a review of the motor development literature, to capture both child-initiated (i.e., curiosity-driven) and adult initiated motor behaviours and used this scheme to code the videos. Parental speech from the videos has also been transcribed. All analyses have been completed and the paper is currently being written up for publication. The coding scheme will form the basis of a further ESRC proposal for secondary data collection, focusing on motor behaviours in autistic children (PI: Dr Xiaoyun Chen, Lancaster University).

Project team

Sam Durrant, Julian Pine, Katie Twomey (Lead) and Gert Westermann

Duration

3 years, starting 1 January 2020

Project Number

3.1

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