Our research

Image of children's toys.

Lab-based studies

Many of our studies are based on observations of how babies’ and toddlers’ eyes move or fixate on visual displays depending on what they hear. Using such techniques, we have tried to answer questions like:

Do babies find words easier to learn when their sounds follow a certain pattern? Could that be why there are some similarities in the shapes of words across language?
Why do we have ‘baby-talk words’ like choo-choo, tummy, and night-night, if train, stomach, and good-night are the words they need to learn eventually? Could it be because these words have shapes that make them easier to spot or learn? Will they help learning other words as well?
When do children learn that pronouns like ‘it’ often refer to something they have heard before?

Naturalistic data

We study how language develops during the first few years and what contributions are made by the language spoken around babies and toddlers by recording them over a period of time and tracking their vocabulary development at the same time.

Collaboration

ELfLanD has a number of collaboration partners, including:

ManyBabies: a multi-lab project that involved 69 labs from 16 countries collecting data from 2,329 3- to 15-monoth-olds. The components we contributed examined infants’ preference for infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech and its connection to later vocabulary development.
Laboratory for Molecular Mechanism of Brain Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan): Research on whether Japanese infants use pitch accent to recognize words.
Language Learning and Processing Lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Work on how infants learn multi-word sequences and how they can spot words in running speech better when they occur unevenly.
EAGLe (Early Acquisition of Grammar and LExicon) Lab at the Czech Academy of Sciences: Project on the morpho-syntactic development in Czech.

Publications

Publications from the lab and relevant works by lab members:

Ota, M. (in press). Child consonant harmony revisited: The role of lexical memory constraints and segment repetition. Language and Speech.
Soderstrom, M., Rocha-Hidalgo, J., Muñoz, L. E., Bochynska, A., Werker, J. F., Skarabela, B., … Ota, M., … Tsui, A. S. M. (in press). Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study. Journal of Child Language.
Wolters, L., Ota, M., & Arnon, I. (2025). Skewed distributions facilitate infants’ word segmentation. Cognition, 263, 106221.
Kempe, V., Ota, M., & Schaeffler, S. (2024). Does child-directed speech facilitate language development in all domains? A study space analysis of the existing evidence. Developmental Review, 72, 101121.
Skarabela, B., Cuthbert, N., Rees A., Rohde, H., & Rabagliati, H. (2023). Learning dimensions of meaning: Children’s acquisition of “but”. Cognitive Psychology, 147, 101597.
Vihman, M., Ota, M., Keren-Portnoy, T., Choo, R. Q., & Lou, S. (2023). A challenge to Whole-word Phonology? A study of Japanese and Mandarin. Language Learning and Development, 19, 480-500.
Vihman, M., Ota, M., Keren-Portnoy, T., Lou, S., & Choo, R. Q. (2023). Child phonological responses to variegation in adult words: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language, 50, 1459-1486.
Holtz, A., & Papineau, B. (2023). Examining the female-talker default in experimental language acquisition research. Infant and Child Development, 33, e2475.
Skarabela, B., Ota, M., O’Connor, R., & Arnon, I. (2021). ‘Clap your hands’ or ‘take your hands’? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases. Cognition, 211, 104612.
Ota, M., San José, A., & Smith, K. (2021). The emergence of word-internal repetition through iterated learning: Explaining the mismatch between learning biases and language design. Cognition, 210, 104585.
ManyBabies Consortium. (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed-speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3, 24-52.
Ota, M., Davies-Jenkins, N., & Skarabela, B. (2018). Why choo-choo is better than train: The role of register-specific words in early vocabulary development. Cognitive Science, 42, 1974-1999.
Ota, M., Yamane, N. & Mazuka, R. (2018). The effects of lexical pitch accent on infant word recognition in Japanese. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2354.
Ota, M., & Skarabela, B. (2018). Reduplication facilitates early word segmentation. Journal of Child Language, 45, 204-218.
Skarabela, B. & Ota, M. (2017). Two-year-olds but not younger children comprehend “it” in ambiguous contexts: Evidence from preferential looking. Journal of Child Language, 44, 255-268.
Ota, M., & Skarabela, B (2016). Reduplicated words are easier to learn. Language Learning and Development, 12, 380-397.
Ota, M., Stewart, M. E., Petrou, A., & Dickie, C. (2015). Lexical effects on children’s speech processing: Individual differences reflected in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58, 422-433.
Skarabela, B., Ota, M., Fazekas, J., & Wihlborg, L. (2015). Do baby-talk words reflect biomechanical constraints on speech production? In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. University of Glasgow.