Learning about Verbs!

4- to 5-year-olds who mostly hear North-American English at home

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Participate Now!” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you. On the day before the video call, your child will watch a 5-minute learning video to get familiar with the study. The next day, during the video call, we will measure what they've learned from the learning video. Your child will see animated videos of cartoon characters moving household objects around, and hear sentences that describe the videos. After some videos, your child will be shown two pictures of objects from the videos. We're interested in which picture your child looks at longer, as this will help us understand how they learn the meaning of new words.

We are studying how children learn to use verbs in the right kinds of sentences. Whenever we listen to sentences, we use the words we’ve heard so far to predict what words might come next. These predictions make language comprehension easier and help us learn the meanings of new words. Research in our lab and others tells us that adults and children use knowledge about verbs to predict what words are most likely to come next. We want to know how children use these predictions to learn new words, and how they learn what words to predict after certain verbs.

30 minutes total (5-minute video on one day, 25-minute video chat the next day)

We will email you a $5 Amazon.com gift card within a week after you participate in this study. To be eligible for the gift card, your child must 1) meet the eligibility criteria for this study, 2) watch the learning video one day before the scheduled session, and 3) show up for the scheduled session. Each child is eligible to participate in the study and receive a gift card only once. You and your child do not need to finish the whole study to receive the gift card.