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Location of data collection : Londres, University of East London.

A study of infant word learning involving electroencephalogram recordings of 38 14-month-old infants and their caregivers found that the infants' proactive looks toward objects during play were associated with greater neural markers of attentional engagement and that, when caregivers focused on the same unfamiliar object as their infants while naming the object, the infants exhibited improved word learning compared to when infants passively followed their caregiver's attentional focus; the results suggested that young children can play an active role during language acquisition, according to the authors.

Goupil, L., Dautriche, I., Denman, K., Henry, Z., Marriott-Haresign, I., & Wass, S. (2024). Leader-follower dynamics during early social interactions matter for infant word learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(38), e2321008121.

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Location of data collection : Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes.

This paper explores the impact of wearing face masks on infants' attention to faces during their first year of life (3-12 months). Face masks were widely adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concerns about their effect on infants' social and linguistic development. Infants are naturally attracted to faces and show preferences for certain areas of the face, such as the eyes and mouth. However, the study revealed that infants of different ages did not show a significant preference for masked faces over unmasked faces. Furthermore, there was no significant change in their attention to faces when they were presented in an inverted position. The results suggest that although masks partially cover faces, this does not have a major effect on infants' attention to faces during their first year of life.

Cristina Ioana Galusca,  Olivier Clerc,  Marie Chevallier,  Caroline Bertrand,  Frederique Audeou,  Olivier Pascalis,  Mathilde Fort (2023). The effect of masks on the visual preference for faces in the first year of life. Infancy, 28(1), 92–105.

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Location of data collection : Londres, University of East London, between january 2018 and december 2020.

In this study, we wanted to find out whether infants' emotional state determines the frequency with which they vocalise. One theory concerning the emergence of vocal communication postulates that infants initially vocalise mainly when they are in intense emotional states (crying, laughing). The ability to ‘detach’ their vocalisations from their emotional states only emerges slowly during the first few years of life. This ability is a fundamental property of human speech: you can say apple when you're sad, and you can also say it when you're happy! This theory also proposes that it is parents who show infants how to produce sounds independently of their underlying emotional state, because when they respond to their baby they are influenced by the baby's emotional state. To test this theory, we analysed the heart rate (a physiological marker of emotional intensity) and vocalisations of 1-year-old infants and their mothers over a 24-hour period. The results show that in infants, heart rate is very strongly linked to their propensity to vocalise. In adults, on the other hand, this relationship is much weaker, as the parents' heart rate is determined more by their infant's heart rate than by their own. As a result, communication between infants and their mothers is mainly synchronised with the infant's emotional fluctuations. In addition, mothers respond very differently to their infants' vocalisations if they are negative (cries), neutral (proto-speech) or positive (laughter), probably because they anticipate the emergence of these different types of vocalisations, and already assign them a different meaning. We believe that this important mechanism enables infants to understand the principle of vocal communication progressively, in a similar way to a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.

Sam Wass, Emily Phillips, Celia Smith, Elizabeth OOB Fatimehin, Louise Goupil (2022). Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads. eLife 11:e77399.

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