How will they use it?

This study is for 18- to 20-month-old babies.

Your baby will watch a series of short videos. First they will see a video of two people describing the rainbow. Next, they will see a series of videos showing these people using a common object, in this case, a cup, in correct or incorrect ways. For example, sometimes the actress will bring the cup to their mouth and sometimes they will bring the cup to their head. Each video will pause after the cup event for 30 seconds. This may look like an error but it is by design! We want to see which kind of events your child chooses to look at and for how long they look at them.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how young children expect that other people will use common objects. We are also interested in whether they expect that people who speak different languages will use the objects similarly or differently. Previous research has demonstrated that early on in life babies begin acquiring culturally-specific standards of behavior such as the "right" way of using objects like cups or bowls and the right word labels for things in the world, like learning the word "ball" to refer to the round bouncy thing as opposed to the four-legged furry house pet. Less is known about how young children integrate person-specific information like the language that a person speaks into their expectations about how that person will use common objects. This study seeks to answer that question.

15-25 minutes

Within one week of your participation, we’ll email you a $20 Amazon.com gift card as a thank-you. To be eligible for the gift card your child must be in the age range for this study, you need to submit a valid consent statement, we need to see that there is a child with you, and your child cannot have participated before in the study. We will send a gift card even if you do not finish the whole study or we are not able to use your child's data.