This project aims to investigate aspects of how children learn the meaning of words in different cultures and social backgrounds, and to use the results in computer models that simulate the evolution and acquisition of language. The focus of this project is on the relations between multimodal interactions (i.e. non-verbal and verbal interactions that provide clues to the meanings of words) and vocabulary development of infants during their second year of life.

The study compares these relations among Changana/Ronga/Portuguese speaking families in rural and urban Mozambique (2009 – 2011) with those among Dutch speaking families in the Netherlands (2011 – 2012). In the field studies, we visit the participating families’ homes, videotape the behaviour of the infants in question, analyse these videos and correlate those aspects that we are interested in with the infants’ vocabulary development.

Once the field studies are near completion in 2012, a corpus will be developed that can be used to parameterise computer simulations. Such computer simulations will be used to study the social, cultural and cognitive mechanisms that underly children’s word learning abilities.