Course curriculum

  • 1

    Course content

    • Using Eye Gaze to Uncover the Foundations of Language

    • PowerPoint

    • Quiz

    • Evaluation

    • Continuing Education Credits

Course info

Course description: Language, gesture and other communicative signals are biologically privileged starting at infancy and continue to have profound effects on human cognition throughout development. Yet most of what we know about how experience impacts cognition comes from work with spoken language. I present findings from a series of studies measuring gaze patterns of infants, children, and adults who are either sign-naïve or are signers, as they watch a range of signals, including body grooming gestures, pantomime, isolated signs, and signed narratives. These empirical findings provide evidence that babies are born ready to receive language as visual-signed or auditory-spoken.


Agenda:

5 minutes: Research goal/question

5 minutes: Short background on eye tracking

30 minutes: Series of four experiments with methods and results

10 minutes: Broad summary of findings


Learner outcomes:

Participants will be able to:

  1. State what we can learn from eye tracking and studying gaze behavior

  2. State what is known about early infant language learning, including the hypersensitivity and perceptual narrowing phenomena

  3. Consider how research findings with eye tracking can impact and benefit practitioners and teachers

Instructor(s)

Rain Bosworth

Dr. Rain Bosworth is an assistant professor in Department of Liberal Studies at RIT/NTID. She is a deaf experimental psychologist, studying perception and language in infants and children at the newly-founded Perception, Language and Attention in Youth (PLAY) Lab. For her doctoral degree at the University of California, San Diego, she studied perceptual abilities in deaf adults. She then worked as a postdoctoral scholar and research scientist studying visual abilities in premature infants and children who were treated for congenital eye disorders. Currently, she is investigating visual and tactile behaviors in deaf and hearing infants, children, and adults. Together, these lines of research reveal how early sensory input shapes perception, cognition, and language processing. Dr. Bosworth teaches Intro to Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Biopsychology, and Quantitative Research Methods. She was born in San Francisco and raised in Hollywood, California.

Speaker disclosures

Financial disclosures: Dr. Bosworth is employed by Rochester Institute of Technology and is receiving royalties for this course.

Nonfinancial disclosures: Dr. Bosworth has no relevant nonfinancial disclosures.

Continuing Education

This course is offered for 0.05 ASHA CEUs.
This course is offered for 0.05 RID CEUs.