Archive for October 29, 2020

In the new episode of our podcast Joanna Kolak talks to Dr Katie Twomey, a lecturer from the University of Manchester and an expert in language and cognitive development. Katie explains how children’s learning is driven by curiosity, based on various experiments to date with infants and toddlers. Can children’s curiosity prompt their word learning? How can we help children explore the world around them? Listen to the podcast to find out!

Here are some of the papers that Katie mentioned during our conversation:

How do you learn to walk? Thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day.

The Goldilocks effect: Human infants allocate attention to visual sequences that are neither too simple nor too complex.

The Goldilocks effect in infant auditory attention.

Hi Everyone! We hope you enjoyed the previous episodes of our podcast. Today we present a new episode in which Dr Gemma Taylor talks to Dr Jamie Lingwood, a Developmental Psychologist specialising in child’s language development and an alumni member of the Leeds Child Development Unit.

Jamie was telling us about his research in which he explored how shared book reading fosters language development. Are you interested in finding out what are the benefits of shared book reading for child’s language development? Should caregivers label objects/characters in the book when reading to young children or should they rather carry on with the story? Is it ok to read the same book to children over and over again if they ask for it? Listen to the podcast and find out!

Here are some resources that Jamie mentioned during the conversation:

http://lucid.ac.uk/media/1885/eb_shared_reading_rowland-et-al.pdf

https://www.bbc.co.uk/tiny-happy-people/sounds-at-storytime/zbpk92p

In today’s podcast Joanna Kolak, researcher from our lab, talks to Professor Angelo Cangelosi form the University of Manchester. Angelo is an expert in language grounding and embodiment in humanoid robots, developmental robotics and human-robot interaction. In the podcast he explains what developmental robotics is and how it combines research on child development with studies on robots behaviour. He also discusses how robots learn who to trust and what impact can studies on human-robot interactions have on our life.

Here are the articles and projects mentioned in the podcast:

Would a robot trust you? Developmental robotics model of trust and theory of mind.

Posture affects how robots and infants map words to objects.

e-LADDA research project – Early Language Development in the Digital Age