Princeton Baby Lab

This weekend, the Baby Lab participated in the 4th annual Spring into Science event! We had so much fun talking to all the students and their families who attended.

See you next year 🌷

The Princeton Baby Lab and Logic of Emotion Lab at TCNJ Community Fest this weekend!

We had so much fun talking to families and playing an emotion fluency game with kids and adults. Researchers at the Logic of Emotion lab have found that the emotion words we learn early in childhood, such as happy and sad, tend to also be the first emotion words that come to mind.

How many emotion words can you name in 60 seconds?

Two undergraduate researchers at the Baby Lab presented their work at the Princeton Summer Research Colloquium. Congrats, Shantell and Chloe!

The Princeton Baby Lab is having a summer full of visits from awesome families! As a special thank-you to the kids who helped us with our research this summer, one of our research assistants (who also happens to be a professional balloon artist!) made some cool, balloon prizes for our tiny tigers!

To see more balloon art, you can check out our research assistant's account 'sBalloonAnimals on Facebook!

It's the Week of the Young Child! This week, we celebrate early learning and the teachers and families who support it.

The Princeton Baby Lab will be at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City this Friday (4/11) for their Family Friday event. Researchers from the New Jersey community will be there to do science activities with kids and talk about child development!

Young artists take on the Princeton Baby Lab! During recent visits to the Baby Lab, our participants wow-ed us with their drawing skills.

We look forward to seeing what you and your child bring to our whiteboard during your next visit!

Register your baby to participate in the Princeton Women's Basketball Baby Race on Saturday, February 15! The baby race will take place at halftime of the women's basketball game versus Yale at 5 PM. Sign up using this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczSaA0WuEahY_gMsaw_uXfg14l5DcBYWxnrm5rXjhmb-UbnQ/viewform

In this study, we asked how children’s curiosity and parents’ scaffolding work together to boost learning.

We designed a word-learning game where we could control whether caregivers and children were actively in control of what they learned about, or whether they were passive observers. In the game, children learned the names of animals. Children were familiar with some of the animals, but unfamiliar with others. First, parents were either given a choice about which two animals their child would learn about, or the animals were chosen randomly by a computer. Next, children either got to choose which animal to learn about, or the animal was chosen randomly by a computer.

We found two key results:
1. Parents were instrumental in helping children encounter new words in their learning. When parents could actively control the words their child was learning, parents drew their child’s attention to unfamiliar words more than when children could choose.
2. Children learned best when they could make active choices about what they learned.

Together, these results show that active engagement from both caregivers and children play important roles during early learning by helping children focus on new information.

Parents ask all the time about how they can best raise a child to be proficient in two languages. This is a complicated topic, and we recommend reading an article we published in 2013 (see the Publications page on the Baby Lab website).

In recent years, we’ve been trying to understand how bilingual children process a mix of two languages, as in, “Where’s the perro?” or “Dónde está el doggy?” These kinds of sentences are fairly common in bilingual households. Children in these studies looked at pictures of common objects or animals and heard simple sentences asking them to look at one of the pictures. For some kinds of language mixing (like when the switch happens at a noun), there can be a very slight delay in identifying the right picture, but for other kinds of language mixing (like when the switch happens on an adjective), there’s often no delay. Our broad takeaway from this research is that bilingual families can use their two languages naturally, and children will adapt to their language environment, showing efficient language processing and typical word learning.

In other research, we investigated how parents can best help their child learn words in two languages. We noted that parents (and picture books) sometimes offer immediate translations of certain words (like saying perro and doggy back to back), and sometimes use their languages at separate times entirely (for example, they might talk about a dog in Spanish for a while, and then switch to English after a few minutes).

We found that bilingual children were good at learning new words regardless of whether translations were spoken immediately or later on. Our results show that different patterns of bilingual interactions provide equal learning opportunities for bilingual children’s vocabulary development.

This weekend the Princeton Baby Lab attended the Boston University Conference on Language Development! Kennedy Casey, a second-year PhD student, presented her research on the many words parents use to refer to objects and animals. Our intuition might tell us that using only the word 'dog' would be best for children's word learning, but her research suggests that kids learn well from both consistent and variable words (like woof-woof and puppy).