How do children understand sentences?

4.5 - 6.5 year olds

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.
In our study, children play a picture-matching game with a puppet over Zoom. The puppet will describe some pictures and the child will try to pick the matching picture. The puppet will produce a sentence with two possible meanings like “The rabbit throws the frog with the basket” in which the rabbit could have used the basket to throw the frog or the frog could have been holding the basket. Children are then asked to pick a picture that matched this sentence, which lets us know how they are interpretting the sentence.

How do we decide what sentence structure to use when speaking to others? Research on adults has shown that our understanding of sentences is affected by the structure of the previous sentence that they heard. This study examines whether the structure of the sentences that children hear affects their understanding of later sentences. This study will help us understand if children are making decisions about sentence structure in the same way as adults or if this ability develops with language. We are interested in whether children's decisions about sentence meaning & sentence structure choice are related to previous sentences in a conversation.

20 minutes

$5 USD Amazon gift card (amazon.com) processed within 2 weeks of participation. Conditions for payment: child needs to be in the listed age range; child needs to be visible on the Zoom call at some point; only one gift card per participant.