How do children learn verbs of mental states?

For 4- to 5- year-olds

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. During the study, your child will hear a new word through a story about two bears, accompanied by picture illustrations. Then, we will show them pairs of videos and sentences and ask them to pick the ones related to the word's meaning.

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.