Houston

Little is known about “baby talk” and just as little is known about how babies perceive and process words and sounds from adults and the world around them. It is through understanding how infants and toddlers develop life-long language skills that researchers at the IU School of Medicine (IUSM) hope to help deaf infants with cochlear implants understand the audible world around them.

The Infant Language Lab at the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children is studying language development of hearing infants and toddlers to establish a yardstick for toddlers who have received cochlear implants.

Among the answers the IU otolaryngology researchers seek: What do normal hearing babies actually comprehend? Can a child with a cochlear implant discriminate sound in the same manner as normal hearing infants? How do infants learn to process what they hear in relation to what they see?

With answers to these questions, researchers can track the progress of infants who use cochlear implants and provide speech therapists a means to assess the progress of individual infants and their language perception.

“Working with infants and toddlers presents unique challenges,” said Derek Houston, Infant Language Lab director and assistant professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery. “Progress has been made in developing techniques to evaluate language perception in children over the age of two. Measuring these skills in infants too young to follow instruction requires the development of innovative testing techniques.”

Houston and his colleague, Tonya Bergeson, the lab’s co-director and an assistant professor of otolaryngology, are developing new techniques for evaluating language perception in an age group where “goo-ing” and “gah-ing” are intense communication.

By recording how the babies respond to different stimuli, researchers are able to evaluate how they differentiate and respond to sounds and learn language. Using varying images, sounds and stimuli, the researchers hope to gain a more in-depth understanding of how language is learned and why children who hear from birth respond differently to noises and speech than children born with severe hearing impairments.

“When a normal hearing infant hears a sharp, sudden noise, the baby looks in the direction the sound came from,” said Houston. “Children born deaf who receive cochlear implants do not respond to sound in the same way—the same sudden noise may not produce a response of any kind.”

How much influence parents have on infant speech perception is another area of study.

“In one of our projects, we are trying to determine why mothers instinctively talk ‘baby talk’ to infants,” said Bergeson. “Interestingly, we are finding that mothers of children with cochlear implants adjust their patterns of talking to the ‘hearing age’ of the child.” Hearing age is determined by how long the child has had a cochlear implant.

Houston and Bergeson are listening intently to what infants and toddlers have to say. They want to tell the world what they learn because, as they both know, it’s much more than just “baby talk.”

http://www.iupui.edu/~babytalk/