Which one of these match?

3-3.5 year old, monolingual English-speaking children.

This study will involve you (the adult) actively leading your child through three activities, and you to complete a questionnaire about your child's language use. For each activity your child will complete, there will be videos and practice questions explaining how to answer the questions. For one of these activities, your child will be choosing an image that matches another image the best (e.g., “dog ON a hill” goes best with “duck ON a rock” and not “duck NEXT TO a rock”). In another activity, your child will be matching pictures of animals "who like to play in the same place" (i.e., who face the same direction). The last activity for your child will involve both describing some images (e.g., “there is a bear ON a table") and choosing pictures that match a description (e.g., the picture where the “dog is ON the hill”). Finally, without your child, you will complete a survey about your child's language use, including a language inventory in which you indicate for each of 213 words how many your child says.

We are interested in learning more about how children's early language skills may support the development of their abilities to perform more complex tasks. Young children often have difficulties when performing tasks that require them to think about relations between objects, such as reasoning that a dog on top of a hill goes best with a duck on top of a rock, compared to a duck next to a rock. However, we currently do not know whether children's knowledge of prepositions (e.g., 'on', 'next to') is related to understanding such relationships. If these skills are related, we will learn more about how to support the development of spatial and language skills in early childhood.

30 minutes

You will receive a $5 Tango gift card for completing this study. To receive compensation, the participating child must be in the age range for this study and must be visible in the consent video. One gift card per child will be awarded. You will be emailed your gift card within a week of participating in the study.