Overcoming social disadvantages through reinforcement of babble in infants from low socioeconomic homes

Babble is the consonant-vowel syllabic vocalisations (e.g., ‘dadada’) produced by infants typically from 7 months of age and is the precursor to spoken language. Whilst early babbling and first word production are known to be related, and infants from low socio-economic backgrounds are known to babble less and develop smaller vocabularies than their middle-SES peers, a causal relationship has not yet been experimentally established. This project will address this through a new intervention, an iPad game (BabblePlay) that rewards infants with moving shapes appearing on the screen when the infants vocalise. Working with our partner Sure Start Children's Centre we will test whether BabblePlay increases babble in low-SES infants and in turn improves their later language. We predict that infants who have used the game will have larger vocabularies than those who have not, and that their parents’ attitudes towards talking to infants will become more favorable as a result.