Soderstrom – Many Baby Study

So, what we’re doing right now is-this is part of a much larger study where babies from lots of different language communities were tested on their preference for infant-directed speech. And all of the original study was done in English infant-directed speech. And now we’re testing babies in other languages, like in this case Norwegian. 

[Norwegian spoken in background] 

There’s been a big change in how we think about doing infancy research. So in the old days it was each lab was doing its own little research project and you’d have – you know, it’s very hard to recruit infant participants and it’s hard to run those studies so we’d have these very small samples. And it’s just really hard to know when you’re comparing across studies, one that was done in Winnipeg and another one that was done in Paris. When you see differences, whether those differences have to do with the differences across those populations or across the languages or the ages of the babies or something about the differences in how the methods are run across the different labs. And they’re also really small samples which can limit our ability to interpret what we find.  

So, there’s been this push to collect data in a much grander scale where we’re sharing our procedures across different labs. In the study called the Many Baby Study that actually is close to 70 laboratories who were all collecting data for the same project. So, we can look at differences that have to do with subtle differences in how you run the method or differences in language or age at a scale that you just couldn’t do with these sort of individual laboratory tests.  

When you’re running a study that is international and large scale like this, one of the challenges is to figure out if, because it’s a language study, what language you’re going to actually do the test in. So, in general about, I’m not sure of the exact numbers but somewhere probably around 90 percent of published studies are in North American English. So, there’s this huge bias in our understanding of how language development works towards the peculiarities of the English language. And our European colleagues are always, for good reason, complaining about this. So when you do a grand study you want to be cognizant of those biases but at the same time because you’re trying to base the research on the literature that’s existing it – you know, you don’t want to sort of randomly do a study in Norwegian without understanding how that fits in with the existing literature.  

So, the original large scale Many Baby Study was done with the English language. But now we have this problem that we’ve now reinforced that bias. So that now there’s an effort to do some of the same – to kind of repeat some of those tests with other languages to expand on our understanding of how this works not just in English but also across languages which is really, really important.