Dr. Rachel Albert, associate professor of psychology, was a recent guest on the “Teachers in the Tiny Chairs” podcast. Dr. Albert discussed her research on infant language development and how it applies to childcare teachers in early childhood education during the interview.

Dr. Rachel Albert, associate professor of psychology, published “Teacher talk: Infant vocal cues affect non-lead infant teachers’ responding,” in Early Childhood Research Quarterly. Dr. Albert investigated how infants’ babble impacts teachers’ responses in childcare settings to see in what ways they are similar and different to mothers’ responses. Her results have potential impacts for thinking about infants’ opportunities for learning in childcare settings and how we educate teachers to work in infant classrooms.

Dr. Rachel Albert, assistant professor of psychology and director of LVC’s Baby Lab, was the keynote speaker for a Mile High Early Learning fundraising event in Denver, Colo., in March. Mile High Early Learning, an organization that provides early childhood programs for low income families, raised $162,000 during the event, which was attended by Denver’s mayor, Michael Hancock, and the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Dianne Primavera. Dr. Albert’s research-based approach to language development, which has been featured on NPR and in Scientific American, focuses on the powerful impact that engaged, responsive adults can have on children.

One of the most popular podcasts in the U.S., NPR’s Hidden Brain, featured Dr. Rachel Albert, assistant professor of psychology, and her research on “Baby Babbling” conducted with colleagues at Cornell University. Dr. Albert’s interview starts about 9.5 minutes into the podcast.

“Researchers learn the social function of babies’ babbling,” featuring work conducted by Dr. Rachel Albert, LVC assistant professor of psychology, was published in the Cornell Chronicle. Dr. Albert, who earned her Ph.D. from Cornell, performed the research with Dr. Jennifer Schwade, senior lecture in psychology at Cornell, and Dr. Michael Goldstein, associate professor of psychology at Cornell. According to the article, the scientists “recorded and recombined the vocalizations of 40 nine-month-olds and their mothers, using a ‘playback paradigm,’ widely used in animal studies, to assess how specific forms of sounds and actions by infants influenced parental behavior.”

“The social functions of babbling: acoustic and contextual characteristics that facilitate maternal responsiveness,” co-authored by Dr. Rachel R. Albert, LVC assistant professor of psychology, and Dr. Jennifer A. Schwade and Dr. Michael H. Goldstein, co-directors of the Behavioral Analysis of Beginning Years (B.A.B.Y.) Laboratory at Cornell University, was published in Development Science, a leading journal in developmental psychology.

By having mothers react to audio-visual examples of babies babbling, the authors determined that vocal maturity and infant gaze influence how mothers perceive and respond to infant vocalizations. The researchers conclude that “An important function of prelinguistic vocalizing may be to elicit parental behavior in ways that facilitate the infant’s own learning about speech and language.”