Gesture to Sound

*For more information on this study, click on this link*

Infants are born with little knowledge about their own language and they are instantly faced with continuous speech stream. To acquire their language, infants need to break such stream into meaningful units, such as sentences, phrases, and words. Language development happens via interactions with adults in a multimodal context. In other words, infants listen and watch what their caregivers are doing. Adults, in turn, tend to speak slower and exaggerate their gestures when they interact with infants. It has been shown that the way adults adapt their speech is beneficial for infants to learn new words and grammar of their language.

What about gestures?

We do not know yet. With this project, we are therefore aiming to disentangle the importance of infant-directed gestures for language development.

For more information or registration, click here.

Watch our instruction video to get a better understanding of how the experiment is conducted: