Infants learn through everyday interactions with their caregivers, and substantial research has demonstrated that the quality of these early caregiver-infant interactions is consequential for early learning. However, current understanding of the impact of early interaction quality on infants’ learning is limited in two major ways. First, an outsized majority of what we know about early development comes from infants growing up in Western cultures. Secondly, while caregiver-infant interactions are complex and multimodal, most existing research focuses on the quantity and quality of speech from caregivers to infants.

To address these issues, the long-term goal of this project is to build a video database of caregiver-infant interactions across diverse cultures. As a first step, we have partnered with the Busara Center in Nairobi, Kenya (https://busaracenter.org/) for data collection. Across two sites (Princeton, NJ and Nairobi, Kenya) we filmed caregivers and infants engaged in free play interactions and collected a range of information about participants, including: demographic data, cultural background, infants’ current language knowledge, and more. All video recordings are currently being coded for a number of speech and non-speech cues (e.g., gesture, facial expressions, action, and touch) for both the caregiver and infant, they will be fully transcribed, and (when applicable) transcriptions will be translated into English. With caregivers’ consent, the corpus of recordings will be shared with researchers in the field of Developmental Science. 

In addition to an initial manuscript characterizing cultural variation in multimodal communication, our efforts will result in the only existing video database of non-Western caregiver-infant interactions. Thus, the corpus will be a rich resource for researchers around the world who are interested in understanding the nature of early caregiver-infant interactions. The existence of this corpus will provide new information about how infants learn across a variety of contexts and will inform the development of more generalizable theories of infant learning.