Longitudinal Peer Social Networks and Early Language Development (LYLE)

Longitudinal Peer Social Networks and Early Language Development: Transforming Understanding of Critical Features of Young Children’s Classroom Experiences. LYLE is a multi-year study that seeks to understand how preschool classroom social networks evolve over time. LYLE involves three teams at The Ohio State University, University of Kansas, and University of Miami. The study uses state of the art sensing technologies which are embedded systems comprised of both hardware and software used to collect continuous proximity and language data on all children in the classroom throughout their day. These allow us to gain a more accurate and holistic picture of children’s experiences, to examine how children’s experiences in their classroom social network evolve over the course of a school year, and how these experiences drive their development in important domains such as language and social-emotional. LYLE is the first study of its kind to examine these trends on such a large scale and across multiple preschool contexts.