Whose bike is that?

For 3-7-year-olds who speak English as a native language.

In this study children will be presented with a series of nine stories about different characters and their possessions. After each story your child will respond to a question by clicking on one of three choices. For example, after hearing a bit about a garage with bikes, the bikes' owners, and a fox, your child will be presented with three different bikes and prompted to select one.

We are researchers in the field of language acquisition in children. In this study we are exploring the development of interpreting multiple possessives such as (1) " John's kid's toy”. Possessives come into children’s speech very early (at age two or so) but multiple possessives like (1) may appear later, perhaps at age six. The complication is that we have other constructions in English such as “kid's toy” or “bird's egg” that name generic things, and children may use them as pre-formed wholes, essentially reducing the amount of possessives involved in interpreting something like (1).

We have designed this study to see if children, like adults, allow for two possible readings of sentences like (1). Essentially, either reading of each of our test sentences may be possible for young children: there are no “wrong answers”, but their answers will allow us to trace the path of development.

15-20 minutes

We will email a Junior Scientist Certificate for your child, as a thank you for participating in the study. Please expect to receive the certificate a week after completing the study, once we have confirmed your child's participation and age. We will only award one certificate per participant, as no child should participate in this study more than once.