Uncovering the baby steps behind how children learn
Ye Li (left), a recent psychology graduate alumna, and Viridiana Benitez, assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, developed a map showing overlap across infant development that helps convey how children learn language. Benitez won the 2025 Outstanding Faculty Mentor Early Career Award from the ASU Faculty Women's Association; she was nominated by Li and fellow alumna Marissa Castellana. Photo courtesy the ASU Faculty Women's Association
The first few years of a child’s life are marked by milestones such as first steps and first words. None of us is born knowing these things; we must learn them.
Research from Arizona State University's Department of Psychology shows that understanding how children learn is best accomplished by comparing their motor, visual and language development.
“Children’s development in vocabulary is intertwined with, and depends on, what they see and how they use their body,” said Ye Li, who recently graduated from ASU's psychology department and was first author on a study that produced a map showing overlap between different types of child development.
For example, during the first four months of life, babies gain color vision and their vision sharpens overall; they often see faces up close, such as when a parent is feeding them or a loved one is holding them. At the same time, they are learning how to parse the sounds that make up words, called phonemes.
“If the face is in view and it’s big, babies might be getting an optimal view of the mouth, and this might help them figure out how to understand the sounds they are hearing,” said Viridiana Benitez, assistant professor of psychology at ASU.
She directs the Learning and Development Lab, which is part of the Early Childhood Cognition Research Group at ASU, and recently won the 2025 Outstanding Faculty Mentor Early Career Award from the ASU Faculty Women’s Association. The lab studies how children learn languages, including those raised in bilingual homes.
By the time babies are about 6 months old, Benitez said, they are becoming experts at detecting phonemes of the languages that they hear regularly.
“Laying out a map lets us highlight the things that are happening at the same time across different development domains and could help us understand how children learn language and other skills,” she said.
The map also shows that by the time babies start understanding words, babbling and making communicative gestures like pointing, their vision has also sharpened further and they are finally able to grasp and hold objects.
When babies start walking, their vocabulary usually explodes. At the same time, they start hearing sentences that include more verbs from adults. The age at which babies walk can vary by culture — children growing up in urban China walk about six weeks after American babies, for example — but the map suggests that language skills are tightly coupled with how babies can move their bodies.
“This comprehensive timeline of development of children showing the connections between domains might change how we think about learning. It also suggests that we should see children as a whole and not just emphasize one facet of development,” Benitez said.
Cultivating the future of development research
Li and fellow psychology graduate student Marissa Castellana nominated Benitez for the mentorship award.
“I counted at least 270 hours, which is 11 days, that Dr. Benitez devoted to meeting with me one-on-one to provide guidance on decisions big and small, such as where I should apply for jobs to which words to cut from a manuscript draft. She has established a very supportive lab space,” said Li, an international student from China who plans to run her own lab to study infant development and language learning across different cultures.
Castellana, who studied bilingualism at ASU, also recently graduated with her doctorate. She is now a research scientist at Michigan State University studying access to child care across the state.
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