Infant Development Lab

A central challenge for language researchers is to explain the developmental process of word learning. For an infant to learn the meanings of words, it is necessary that the infant live in a multisensory world of communicating caregivers. There is, however, little research that addresses the ongoing interactions between the developing preverbal infant and the communicative environment that allows an infant to learn word-object or action relations prior to 9 months. The Infant Development Laboratory at Florida Gulf Coast University, Psychology, staffed by Dr. Lakshmi Gogate, a developmental psychologist, and her undergraduate students, conducts research on how early auditory-visual perception relates to language development in infants. The lab studies normally developing infants and their mothers, and preterm infants and their mothers. The lab’s ongoing research examines the dynamics of how an infant puts together spoken words with objects or actions. It conducts four domains of research on communicative development in infancy by observing mother-infant interactions and/or using tightly controlled experiments with infants.

Preterm and Full-term Infants’ Perception and Attention to Word-Object Pairings and Later Word Learning
Preterm infants are at greater risk for developmental delays in language due to immature sensory and motor systems. Preterm birth affects half a million babies each year, including 29,287 in Florida. In this longitudinal study, funded by the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, the Gogate lab examines the early ability to pair words with objects, to determine whether infants born preterm are delayed compared to full-term infants. A delay in the ability to pair words and objects may lead to a delay in language development. If infants’ ability to learn word-object relations predicts later language outcomes, it could lead to earlier diagnosis and intervention to prevent language delays in at-risk infant populations. Please see http://www.marchofdimes.com/florida/5688_21417.asp

The Intersensory Origins of Infants’ Learning of Verb-Action Relations
Using infant-controlled habituation procedures, preverbal infants are being investigated to examine whether they can learn the arbitrary relations between spoken words and actions, when an adult names and performs the actions simultaneously for the infants. This study is among the first to investigate the origins of infants’ verb learning.

The Developmental Transition from Dyadic to Triadic Communication
The main goal of this study is to longitudinally investigate how mothers guide their infants’ attention to objects, and how maternal communication interacts with infants’ attention to facilitate the transition from pre-communicative to communicative interactions. This study is a collaborative effort with Drs. Daniel Messinger and Abdel-Mottaleb from the University of Miami. In particular, this study investigates how mothers transition from looming self to looming objects from 2 to 10 (or 12 months), and how infants transition from attention to object or mother but not both (dyadic), to joint attention to mother and object (triadic) during maternal communication. Triadic communication is critical to language development.

An Empirical Test of the Whole Object Hypothesis
Traditional language theories assume that infants are born with the built in constraint or bias that labels refer to whole and not parts of objects. In collaboration with her students, Eric Morris, Leslie Faried, and Heather Brangwin, Dr. Gogate is investigating the possibility that this constraint might in part stem from the communicative environment. They are testing the possibility that mothers introduce novel objects as wholes rather than in parts to their preverbal infants- thus, naming the whole object first prior to naming the parts of an object.