A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility, Best Practices, and Theory-Building.
Abstract
The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate
these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on
whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research-especially
with infant participants-also has discipline-specific replicability challenges, including
small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication
efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and
promoting replicability in infancy research: large-scale, multi-laboratory replication
efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The
ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate
how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights
into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This
project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less-biased
estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be
used for later study planning, and a series of best-practices blueprints for future
infancy research.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Social SciencesPsychology, Developmental
Psychology
ADULT-DIRECTED SPEECH
CROSS-LANGUAGE
PREVERBAL INFANTS
PREFERENCE
MOTHERESE
SCIENCE
RELIABILITY
PERCEPTION
STIMULI
FALSE
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19716Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/infa.12182Publication Info
Frank, Michael C; Bergelson, Elika; Bergmann, Christina; Cristia, Alejandrina; Floccia,
Caroline; Gervain, Judit; ... Yurovsky, Daniel (2017). A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility, Best Practices,
and Theory-Building. Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, 22(4). pp. 421-435. 10.1111/infa.12182. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19716.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
More Info
Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Elika Bergelson
Associate Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Dr. Bergelson accepts PhD applicants through the Developmental and Cog/CogNeuro areas
of P&N and the CNAP program.In my research, I try to understand the interplay of processes
during language acquisition. In particular, I am interested in how word learning relates
to other aspects of learning language (e.g. speech sound acquisition, grammar/morphology
learning), and social/cognitive development more broadly (e.g. joint attention processes)
in the first few

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info