How does the environment affect children’s development?

The BiSC project, in collaboration with the Language Attention, Perception and Acquisition Laboratory (APAL) of the University of Barcelona, ​​aims to go beyond the collection of conventional clinical measures to obtain additional measures of processing and learning.

The study of learning skills is important to determine the needs of each stage of children’s development. This process can be analyzed from different perspectives. One of the directions we’ve taken in understanding these skills is investigating babies’ ability to learn words at 18 months.

Word learning is a foundational skill necessary for later language development. Various factors intervene in it, ranging from the environment in which the baby develops, as well as maturation factors, biological rhythms, and social skills that are learned in the family.

By measuring the performance of infants on an associative word-learning task, these factors can be explored more directly and move towards understanding the complex interactions that exist between the environment and children’s cognitive and language development.

* Familiarization phase: images of known objects are presented. Then two new words associated with two objects unfamiliar to the baby are introduced.

We take this opportunity to thank each and every one of the volunteer families who have already participated in our studies and we extend an invitation to all of you who are interested in being part of this great project. We wait for you!

The text has been written by Jessica Sánchez-Galán, research technician of the BiSC project.