Charting Infants’ Language, Auditory, and Motor Experiences in Everyday Contexts

Infant development, including language, is shaped by infants’ experiences with the external environment. This environment is not a uniform stream of sensory input, but is structured into contexts, activities, and routines that shape the flow of experiences. Gradually developing motor abilities also enable infants to engage with these contexts in new ways, fostering opportunities for learning. Despite their significance, little is known about how the real-world contexts and infants’ own motor development influence caregiver and infant communication and the speech that infants hear, or how this structuring impacts infant language development. In addition, although constituting the majority of infants’ hearing experience and acting as cues for everyday contexts, the non-speech sound experiences of infants have not been extensively studied. To address these gaps, EveryContext aims to transform our understanding of early language development by enabling detailed, context-dependent analysis of infants’ everyday experiences. We will collect a first-ever large-scale longitudinal dataset consisting of concurrent child-centered audio and motor data from 3 to 18-month-old infants’ home environments using modern wearable technologies (~8000 hours of data). We will then develop and apply state-of-the-art computational methods to automatic description of the collected speech, audio and movement data, followed by inference of infants’ everyday contexts and activities using these data descriptors. Enabled by the contextual knowledge and detailed data descriptors, we will then study infants’ language experiences in different everyday contexts and as a function of their motor development. As a result, the project will reveal how infant language experiences are shaped by the everyday contexts they are engaged in, how the learning opportunities are affected by infants’ own motor development, and how all these factors contribute to their language development outcomes.