We tend to treat language as something that happens in the ears and the mouth — sounds going in, words coming out. But a lot of my research keeps pointing somewhere less obvious: the hands.
Long before infants say their first word, they are busy reaching, grasping, turning objects over, and bringing them close to look at. Each of those small actions is also a tiny lesson. A baby who can rotate a cup in their hands gets to see its handle, its rim, the way the inside differs from the outside. That richer visual experience seems to feed forward into language — children who explore objects more, and whose parents narrate that exploration (“look, it’s round, it goes on top”), tend to understand more words a year later.
What I find compelling is that these effects are strongest exactly where you’d expect the system to be under the most strain. In our work with infants born preterm, the link between early motor skill and later vocabulary runs through visual processing — as if the usual developmental cascade becomes more visible when one part of it is delayed. Development, in other words, is less a set of separate skills switching on in sequence and more a chain of small advantages, each making the next one possible.
This is the kind of thing I’ll write about here: half-formed ideas from the lab, papers I’m reading, and the occasional detour into how all of this connects to reasoning and AI. Thanks for reading.