This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Casey Lew-Williams at Princeton University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the neural mechanisms by which variation in the quality of infants early learning environment, across the full spectrum of socioeconomic status (SES), impacts infants’ language learning. Much of infants’ learning occurs through social interactions with others, and the quality of these early social interactions is consequential for linguistic and cognitive development. In particular, there is substantial variation in input quality across the SES spectrum, often putting infants from lower-SES families at risk for learning challenges. However, current investigations of how input impacts learning have had a dominant focus on language, undercutting current understanding of the full complexity of infants’ everyday communicative environments. Further, minimal research has studied the neural mechanisms through which input quality influences learning. This project will address both of these limitations, exploring relations between variation in input quality across the full SES spectrum, neural activity during caregiver-infant interactions, and language outcomes six months later.
This project takes a novel approach to studying how infants learn in social interactions with caregivers. Objective 1 focuses on examining variation in “infant-directed communication†(IDC) across the SES spectrum. IDC includes a broad suite of interconnected signals that contribute to infants’ everyday learning environment: language, action, gesture, emotion, and touch. Objective 2 uses dual-brain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate relations between quality of IDC and the extent to which neural activity in caregivers’ and infants’ brains are correlated during communicative interactions. Finally, Objective 3 asks how IDC and neural coupling independently and jointly predict infants’ vocabulary growth. Together, these objectives will provide new insight into the mechanisms by which infants across the SES spectrum learn in interactions with their caregivers, with the ultimate goal of generating new ideas for interventions that aim to enhance learning.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
