Thank you so much!

Teşekkür ederim Akira hocam 😊

Proud to share this work from my time in Koç University Language & Cognition Lab.
Read the full paper here: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We hope it contributes to better understanding early spatial language development pathways.
#devpsycsky

This work highlights the importance of parents' spatial input during infants’ early object exploration for early spatial language development especially for populations like preterm infants who may receive less of it.

We also found that infants who both explored more and received more spatial language input had stronger spatial vocabularies later on.
This suggests a cascading developmental effect shaped by early experiences.

Importantly, the interaction between object exploration and spatial input at 14 months predicted spatial language at 26 months regardless of whether infants were born preterm or full-term.

On average, spatial input co-occurred with 44% of object exploration events.
This co-occurrence differed by group:
-Preterm: 36.1%
-Full-term: 52.1%

We found that preterm and full-term infants showed similar levels of object exploration.
However, parents of preterm infants used significantly less spatial language during play sessions.

This longitudinal study followed infants from 14 (Time 1) to 26 months (Time 2). We examined:
1-Infant object exploration at Time 1
2-Parents’ spatial input during play at Time 1
3-Infants' spatial language at Time 2

You might wonder: do infants actually know spatial words before age 3?
According to parent reports, many do! Our results from CDI showed that infants in our sample were already producing several spatial terms by 26 months.
Here’s a summary from our data👇

Learning spatial words opens important pathways for later cognitive development.
While much of the existing research has focused on preschoolers and toddlers, the predictors of spatial language development in younger infants remain understudied, and this was our motivation.

We investigated how early object exploration and parents’ spatial input shape infants’ later spatial language development — in both preterm and full-term infants.
🧸🗣️➡️🧠