Let's Learn a New Word about the Mind!

For 4- to 5-year-olds

During the study, you will fill out a brief survey about the language(s) your child hear regularly. Your child will first hear a story about two bears, which uses a new word to express the characters' mental states. Then, they will watch 6 pairs of short videos. For example, in one video a girl discovers that a cookie box is empty, while in the other video the actor walks away thinking there are cookies inside. Your child then hears a sentence about what's going on in the actor's mind and chooses the matching video.

We are studying how children may learn new words by attending to their grammatical contexts. We know that children can use this strategy to learn concrete action verbs (like "jump"), and we are curious whether it applies to more abstract verbs like "think" or "want". This helps us understand how such vocabulary is learned by children when these mental actions are rarely directly observable. It also helps us better understand children's extraordinary abilities to extract grammatical patterns in the speech they hear.

20 minutes

To thank you for your participation, you will receive a $15 gift card for Amazon.com within one week from the study date. To be eligible for the gift card: (1) You need to be located in the U.S. (2) Your child must be in the age range for the study and present with you during the study. (3) You need to provide a valid consent statement, and (4) this needs to be the first time that your child is participating in this study.