Did you know that a baby’s skill at matching the sights and sounds of speech is predictive of their later language development? Sounds obvious, right? To learn language, babies need to associate what they see with words they hear, e.g., that furry four-legged creature is a “dog.”
But researchers at the Infant Development Lab at Florida International University found that intersensory processing – using information from 2 or more senses – is all by itself a factor in how easily babies acquire language. This ability develops markedly over the first 6 months of life as infants begin to notice that 2 or more of their senses are providing the same info at the same time (like seeing and hearing a ball bounce). The matching information grabs their attention and highlights common features of events, such as timing or rhythm, that help them connect the sight and sound together.
To see how this skill affects later language outcomes, researchers showed more than 100 6-month-olds videos of six speaking woman while playing a single soundtrack that matched just one of the women, and assessed each infant’s ability to identify the woman speaking (using eye-tracking data). They then measured the children’s language development through 36 months and found that the accuracy of intersensory processing (how well a 6-month-old had maintained attention to the face of the person speaking) was a unique predictor of their language development into the third year of life.
The study’s authors suggest this effect came about because children who were more accurate on their intersensory processing had greater attentional resources available that, in real life, would allow them to take advantage of additional intersensory information pertinent to language (like noticing a parent pointing at the ball, hearing them say ball and watching their lips form the word ball) to support other language learning skills like word-mapping and statistical learning. They believe that further work should be done to determine if deficits in intersensory processing of faces and voices might be early identifiers of children susceptible for later language impairment which would then allow the development of interventions to improve that skill in infancy to improve language outcomes.
Go to this link to read more: https://bit.ly/44d5nkt
To learn more about the lab, go here: https://infantlab.fiu.edu/