Project description
How daily life shapes early language development
Child development takes place in everyday environments, characterised by various daily activities and routines that play a role in shaping infant-caregiver communication and learning. However, there is limited knowledge about the impact of different real-world environments and developing child motor skills on the speech and sounds children are exposed to and how they affect language development. The ERC-funded EveryContext project aims to change this by creating the first large-scale longitudinal and dense dataset of audio and child motor data, covering children aged 3 to 18 months of age, capturing thousands of hours of home life and automatically describing speech, sounds and movements. The aim is to reveal how daily environments and activities as well as concurrently developing child motor skills shape children’s language experiences.
Objective
Infant development, including language, is shaped by infants’ experiences with the external environment. This environment is not a uniform stream of sensory input, but is structured into contexts, activities, and routines that shape the flow of experiences. Gradually developing motor abilities also enable infants to engage with these contexts in new ways, fostering opportunities for learning. Despite their significance, little is known about how the real-world contexts and infants’ own motor development influence caregiver and infant communication and the speech that infants hear, or how this structuring impacts infant language development. In addition, although constituting the majority of infants’ hearing experience and acting as cues for everyday contexts, the non-speech sound experiences of infants have not been extensively studied.
To address these gaps, EveryContext aims to transform our understanding of early language development by enabling detailed, context-dependent analysis of infants’ everyday experiences. We will collect a first-ever large-scale longitudinal dataset consisting of concurrent child-centered audio and motor data from 3 to 18-month-old infants’ home environments using modern wearable technologies (~8000 hours of data). We will then develop and apply state-of-the-art computational methods to automatic description of the collected speech, audio and movement data, followed by inference of infants’ everyday contexts and activities using these data descriptors. Enabled by the contextual knowledge and detailed data descriptors, we will then study infants’ language experiences in different everyday contexts and as a function of their motor development. As a result, the project will reveal how infant language experiences are shaped by the everyday contexts they are engaged in, how the learning opportunities are affected by infants’ own motor development, and how all these factors contribute to their language development outcomes.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
33100 TAMPERE
Finland
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