We have a new research project examining how infant directed speech influences the infant’s subsequent language development.
Want to get involved?
We are looking for undergraduate students who are interested in exploring infant language development across cultures. For more information, please email wilbournlab@gmail.com.
Want to participate?
We would love to have you and your child participate! Infants between the ages of 14-16 months with parents whose first language is English are eligible to participate. This study will take place in our lab at Duke University. The whole appointment will take one hour. If you are interested in participating in this study (or if you just have any questions about the study), please send a reply to this email for more information or complete this brief survey. We will then set up a day and time at your convenience to participate.
Infant Identity and Emotion Perception (IDMorph and EmoMorph)
We have a new research project how infants perceive identity and emotion across cultures.
Want to get involved?
We are looking for undergraduate students who are interested in infant development, the own race effect, and eye tracking. For more information, please email ricarda.brieke@duke.edu.
Want to participate?
We would love to have you and your child participate! Infants between the ages of 5-18 months are eligible to participate. This study will take place in our lab at Duke University. The whole appointment will take one hour. If you are interested in participating in this study (or if you just have any questions about the study), please email wilbournlab@gmail.com or complete this brief survey. We will then set up a day and time at your convenience to participate.
Subtle Asian Data Analysis
We have a new research project examining global diasporic Asian racial and ethnic identity and belonging. We are currently collecting data via an online Qualtrics survey, as well as analyzing posts from the Facebook group subtle Asian traits.
Want to get involved?
We are looking for undergraduate students who are interested in exploring what it means to be Asian in a globalizing world. For more information, please email lindsey.shi@duke.edu.
Past Studies
Gesture and Learning Outcomes Study (ABC THRIVE)
We examined how different types of non-verbal gestures can influence learning outcomes for children through online and in-school studies.
iPac: Interactions between Parents and Children
Much of the language infants learn during the first two years comes from the verbal and gestural input they get from their caregivers. We also know that infants often influence their own language learning through the use of gestures, such as pointing. However, we still don’t know a lot about how early communicative skills are built in the context of parent-child interactions. We also don’t know how these patterns of interaction may look at different stages of development. In this study, parents and their infants play with toys and read a picture-book together in a naturalistic one-on-one setting. We are hoping to use the interactions we see in this study to find out more about how parents and children work together to build children’s early vocabulary and communicative skills.
PALM: Pointing as a Learning Mechanism
Before infants are able to communicate with spoken language, they often begin communicating with their gestures. Pointing gestures in particular have been shown to play an important role in language development. However, it remains unclear how infants’ early pointing gestures may influence their language development. The goal of this study is to learn more about how infants’ early pointing gestures shape their language development. In this study, parents and their infants will sit together at a small table across from an experimenter. The experimenter will ask the child to point to different novel objects, and then teach the child the labels for these objects.
MOP: Motives of Pointing
Infants and young children are not passive observers of the world around them – they are active contributors to their developmental experiences! One way children actively contribute to their learning experiences is by using their gestures to seek out information. For example, children will point towards objects not just because they want to have those objects, but also because they want to learn about those objects! In this study, we ask what types of information infants are requesting when they gesture. We will do so by asking children to gesture towards novel toys. In response, we will give children different types of information about those toys (such as the toy’s label, or how the toy works). By observing how satisfied children are when given different types of information, and how well they learn that new information, we can start to better understand how young children use their hands to shape their learning!
ICE: Isolating Communication Effectiveness
Nonverbal cues are powerful tools for social communication. Infants have been found to be able to both produce and follow nonverbal cues. This particular study is aimed at exploring infants’ abilities to follow individual and combinations of nonverbal cues. For this study, infants on their parent’s lap at a small table across from an experimenter. The experimenter directs the child’s attention to different objects using different kinds of cues. These cues include head turns, eye gaze, and pointing gestures. We are interested in figuring out which cue is best at directing infants’ attention.
EATS: Emotion and Affect in Toddlers
Now that we know infants at 14 months can tell the difference between a happy and a disgust facial expression, we’re trying to find out if this skill extends to verbal expressions of emotion as well. We have two goals for this second part of our EATS study: 1) to see if we can teach infants to link a verbal expression of disgust and happy with a facial expression of disgust and happy and 2) to determine if infants have already learned this link on their own by 14 months.
