Babies, Babbling, and the BLAB

I recently fell in love with a new NPR podcast series all about psychology and neuroscience called Hidden Brain. NPR podcast series have always been my favorite to listen to when going for a run, cleaning, or doing practically anything that allows simultaneous work and podcast listening. Anyway, yesterday I was listening to a Hidden Brain episode called "Baby Talk: Decoding the Secret Language of Babies," which was all about babbling and how babies communicate. Shankar Vedantam first presented a study performed by Laura Cirelli, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto in Scarborough, in which infants were placed in front-facing baby carriers, bounced to the beat of a song playing, such as one of the Beach Boys' hit songs, and watched another adult either bounce in or out of sync with them. Afterwards, the baby would be presented with a situation in which the adult they had seen was struggling to pick up some object. Cirelli found that babies tended to help the adult more often if the adult had been dancing in sync with them. Moving in sync with someone else implies a sense of affection, a sense of connection and understanding. Vedantam also presented research findings from Rachel Albert, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Lebanon Valley College, in which she described how babbling actually involves conversations and majorly indicates learning or a state in which a baby is open to learning, open to developing social feedback loops. I found this rather intriguing because the babbling of babies often seems rather random and meaningless to people who speak more "formal" languages. What if we all started babbling? This Hidden Brain episode on babies and babbling relates strongly to a significant advancement in my life. Today was commencement, so I'm officially a senior and am all moved out from NCSSM. However, in about two weeks, I will be returning to NCSSM to conduct research in the Bergelson Lab, or BLAB, at Duke University. Majorly, Elika Bergelson, the Primary Investigator of the BLAB, focuses on studying language acquisition in infants with data acquired through eye tracking trials, daylong audio-recordings, and on-head and context cameras. I am also currently taking "Hybrid Writing Animals," which is a creative writing seminar at Duke taught by Hannah VanderHart. On International Women's Day, I met Dr. VanderHart at a poetry reading event at Flyleaf Books, and she offered to let me audit her seminar. It is truly amazing the opportunities you can discover and obtain just by talking to amazing people! Now that I've completed a copious number of exams and a plethora of papers, I'm incredibly excited to focus fully on researching language acquisition and writing and reading poetry (and Chinese of course).