The LECS Lab is excited to share that PI Hsin has been awarded a new grant under the Facilitating Uni-PI Science and Engineering (FUSE) Program at The University of Alabama. The $20,000 grant will fund the project, “Modernizing First Language Development Research with Baby Word Tracker.”
Starting in early 2025 we will be looking for parents of infants and toddlers to partner with to help make sure our baby-language tracking app is useful and engaging for families from all across our community. We are grateful to UA for funding this work and look forward to sharing it with families and researchers alike! Please see below for the project abstract, and reach out if you have any questions or comments.
PI Hsin awarded UA FUSE grant for Baby Word Tracker project
12/17/2024
| The LECS Lab is excited to share that PI Hsin has been awarded a new grant under the Facilitating Uni-PI Science and Engineering (FUSE) Program at The University of Alabama. The $20,000 grant will fund the project, “Modernizing First Language Development Research with Baby Word Tracker.” Starting in early 2025 we will be looking for parents of infants and toddlers to partner with to help make sure our baby-language tracking app is useful and engaging for families from all across our community. We are grateful to UA for funding this work and look forward to sharing it with families and researchers alike! Please see below for the project abstract, and reach out if you have any questions or comments. |  |
Project Abstract
Parents are naturally fascinated with their children’s language development—its apparent effortlessness, its speed, its accuracy (and inaccuracies), not to mention its charm. Language acquisition research can help us see just what makes it so fascinating, with many methods available for studying children’s language development. Although those methods have yielded numerous findings about how children acquire language, they tend to suffer from one of three main weaknesses: (1) they may not generalize to the broader population (e.g., longitudinal diary studies of individual children), (2) they may not be able to capture the time-course of any one child’s learning (e.g., large-scale cross-sectional data collection), or (3) they may be too far removed from everyday experience to capture the full range of children’s language abilities (e.g., lab-based experimental studies). But there is a new methodological prospect, enabled by the proliferation of technology that characterizes our world today: large-scale, naturalistic, longitudinal data collection of child language data through parent-focused mobile applications. This project will partner with parents to develop, test, and distribute Baby Word Tracker, an innovative and user-friendly mobile application that will for the first time allow researchers to collect fine-grained, longitudinal language acquisition data over time from a large group of families in a wide range of circumstances and settings. The project activities—partnering with parents to develop the app, validating it with existing language development measures, distributing it to the public, and conducting analyses of the initial dataset—will lead to valuable outcomes for both parents and researchers. In Baby Word Tracker, parents will have access to a fun activity on their phone that helps satisfy their curiosity about the words and phrases their infant or toddler learns over time, providing them with simple visualizations to watch their child’s vocabulary grow. Later extensions of the project may also include diagnostic functions for identifying and addressing atypical language development. In this first phase of the project, research will focus on tackling questions uniquely answerable by a dataset of the kind the app will yield. It will show the field the extent to which broadly accepted findings may or may not be reproduced when we have the benefit of data reflecting the genuine experiences of children over time, in a wide range of circumstances.