Are there some buttons or many buttons?

For children who are four or five years old.

In this study, your child will meet Mrs. Bear and hear her describe jars with different proportions of candy and rocks with sentences like "Some of them are candy" and "Many of them are candy." She will do this for items in 10 different jars. Then, your child will see jars with different proportions of buttons and shells and will choose whether they think Mrs. Bear would say, "Some of them are buttons" or "Many of them are buttons." Your child will do this for 19 different jars.

We are investigating whether children can change their expectations about what words a person will use after hearing them speak. This is interesting because children often assume that all people will speak the same way, but this isn't actually true in real life. For example, one person might use "some" to describe proportions up to 30%, but other people would use "some" up to 60%. In previous studies, we have found that children can update their expectations about how a speaker will use words like "some" and "many" after hearing them use those words. We are interested in whether these expectations are specific to the domain they observed or if children generalize across domains. In this study, children hear Mrs. Bear talk about candies, and we are interested in whether this changes their expectations about what she will say about a different domain, namely buttons.

15 minutes

Children will receive a junior scientist certificate within two weeks of completing the study.