Is this tree ZORPY?

5- to 6-year-olds

In this study, you and your child will watch video clips of conversations between people which use some made-up words. Your child will see a total of 10 conversations, each introducing a new made-up word. Each conversation will be between 4 and 12 statements back and forth between the two characters. After each set of conversations, your child will guess what the made-up word used in that set of conversations means. For example, you will ask them, "what do you think ZORPY means?" after hearing a conversation using the word ZORPY. You will help your child navigate through the study by clicking the button to move to the next screen, clicking to play the video of each conversation, reading your child some text (for example, "what do you think ZORPY means?"), and typing their responses to the questions.

We are interested in how sentence structure helps kids figure out the meanings of new words. For example, if you hear something like "The blick was crying," you are likely to think that blick is something animate; if you hear "She was blicking all night," you are likely to think that blick is some kind of action or event. In this particular study, we are looking at how sentence structure might help kids figure out the meaning of adjectives-- words like "smart" or "tall."

20 minutes

We will email you a $5 gift card from Amazon.com within approximately three days. To be eligible for the gift card your child must be in the age range for this study, you need to submit a valid consent statement, and we need to see that there is a child with you. But we will send a gift card even if you do not finish the whole study or we are not able to use your child's data!