SENFM will examine how infants' vocal development during the first year of life interacts with their early language environment to provide feedback that can be drawn upon in acquiring and developing speech sounds and, ultimately, producing first words. The project will involve working with a cohort of families and their infants aged 2-18 months to collect home-recorded data, with accompanying experiments in the York BabyLab. We will be implementing an existing methodology - ultrasound imaging of the tongue - to a new population - young infants - to understand changes taking place in the speech articulators (in this case, tongue and lips) over the course of development, and how these are affected by different language environments. Ultimately, we are aiming to test whether infants draw on sensorimotor feedback (the simultaneous sensory events experienced during vocal production, such as proprioception, muscular function, and auditory input) to drive their language learning.
We will ask families who are taking part in the SENFM project to record a day in the life of their baby each month between 2-14 months of age to learn about the sounds and words that they say and that they hear around them. We will also invite families to take part in two listening experiments and two ultrasound experiments at different timepoints during this 12-month period. These experiments will explore what kinds of sounds interest babies most and how they respond to hearing them. Finally, we would like to follow up with families when their baby reaches 18 months and again at 2 years to collect a little more home recorded data and find out about what words they may understand and say at this age. By analysing the data from these different strands of the project together we will learn more about the interplay between the sensorimotor feedback that babies gain from the sounds they produce and the sounds and words they hear around them day to day, and how this interplay influences their early language development.