Lab-History

Research on the regulation of intersubjective communication via processes of emotional attunement at the Leibniz University Hannover was established, when the BabyLab Hannover was founded at the Institute of Special Needs (Department of Speech Pedagogy and Therapy) in 2009. Initially focusing on early mother-child dyads the BabyLab collaborated with the Institute of Information Processing (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rosenhahn) in an eye-tracking study concerning the influence of affective input on wordlearning and memory in 24 to 36 month old monolingual German children (Lüdtke/ Leischner/ Weissenborn/ Waxman).

Collaboration of the two institutes was intensified by the joint development of different hardware (audio and videotools) enabling multiperspective, synchronized (invivo) recording and multimodal analysis of human communication (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ostermann, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rosenhahn und Dr. Frank). In 2014 the university president granted funding for promoting labresearch at the Faculty of Humanities. Funding was granted to: Prof. Dr. Effenberg/MotorLab, Prof. Dr. Grabowski/Literacylab und Prof. Dr. Lüdtke/BabyLab. In the following years the BabyLab Hannover collaborated with several other Babylabs also researching early communicative development across Europe including Københavs Universitet (Prof. Mette Vaever), Université Paris Ouest Nanterre (Prof. Maya Gratier) and the University of Edinburgh/Glasgow (Prof. Colwyn Trevarthen, Dr. Jonathan Delafield-Butt).

In 2018 the „Lab for Relational Communication Research” is established at the Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) setting the foundation of this interdisciplinary research cooperation. In 2019 the new multimedia laboratory at the Institute for Information Processing was finished. The Lab focusses now on the joint development of own hard- and software tools for basic and applied research on (early) communication development in several projects.