What Made That Sound?

For 18-month olds

Your baby will see an adult who is curious about what is behind a curtain. There will be a sound, and then two new items will appear on the screen that could have made the sound, and we will see which one your baby looks at when we say the word we used for the sound. This will happen for 10 pairs of objects. The first sounds are a cat meowing and a bus engine, and you can look at these with your baby. For the rest of them, we will ask you to close your eyes, but at the end we will show you all the objects your baby saw.

We know that babies are good at putting together the name of a new thing (like "bottle" when they see a bottle) and the actual thing. This is a large part of how babies learn new words. We want to understand what happens when babies encounter new things that they can't see, and that they have to use other senses (such as their hearing) to explore and learn things about. We will be using sounds of living things and sounds of nonliving things to see whether babies can tie information that comes from sound alone (without seeing any part of the objects in the first place) to potential object traits, for example like having eyes, or being living creatures. This will helps us understand how babies connect language to information that is not visual.

10 minutes

To receive payment for the study, the child will need to be visible in the consent video, and be within the age range of the study. This study can only be done once per participating caregiver. The payment will be sent within 1 week of joining the study. The payment will be a $5 Amazon.com gift card.