Introduction

The Study of Environmental Effects on Developing Linguistic Skills (SEEDLingS) is an initiative to explain how infants' early linguistic and environmental input plays a role in their learning. We focus on understanding how babies between 6-to 18-months old learn words from the visual, social, and linguistic world around them.

SEEDLingS began data collection in 2014 and ended data collection in 2016.

One-hour video and 16-hour audio recordings were generated in each infant's home every month, from 6 to 17 months of age, for a set of 44 infants. The goal of this study is to assess infants' language growth over this time period, particularly in the word learning domain. Trained coders listened to video and audio recordings (or portions of recordings) to identify each concrete, imageable noun that was said audibly in proximity to the infant. Those nouns (and data about the utterance that contained the noun, whether the object was present at the time the noun was said, and who said it) make up the SEEDLingS Corpus Nouns Dataset. Every two months, infants came into the lab for an eye-tracking study to test their word comprehension (and for older infants, their word production). Half of the tested items were generated from the most frequent annotated nouns in the video and audio recordings from the previous month.