Helping Lilly pack up her things

5-year-olds who predominantly or only speak English.

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Schedule a time to participate” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you. Once the call begins our researcher will introduce your child to our friend, Lilly. Lilly has lots of cool things, like dinosaurs, dolls, boats, and brushes, but they all need to be packed up before she moves! We will look at boxes of Lilly's things, and Lilly will tell us what she needs to close using sentences with the word "most." Based on what Lilly says, your child will choose which boxes to pack up.

There are many ways that language can be used to talk about multiple objects or entities, such as “some,” "all,” ”most,” and “three.” We know that children as old as 7 have not mastered all the nuances of these words. In this study, we are interested in whether information about number and proportion influence how children understand "most." We think that in some scenarios, children will treat "most" as if it means "many" because they pay more attention to number information, but that in other scenarios they will interpret "most" in the way that adults do because they pay more attention to proportional information. The results of this study will help us gain a better understanding of what develops as children start to understand "most" in an adult-like way.

15 minutes

Within two weeks you will be sent a $5 gift card to Target or Amazon.com. You will be compensated even if your child is unable to complete the whole study. However, we cannot compensate unless you attend the Zoom call with an age appropriate child whose only or predominant language is English, and we cannot compensate the participation of a single child more than once.