Research |
We study the behavior of children from infancy through childhood, using engaging, age-appropriate activities. The studies we are working on for this quarter are listed below.
For more information about what happens when a child comes in to participate, please visit our Parents page. To read about some of our recent studies, check out our latest Newsletter (January 2010 ).
Previous newsletters: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006
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 Winter 2010  |
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Event Memory |
Age range: 3 and 4 year olds
The Event Memory study is looking at which parts of events children remember better. We are looking at simple events that involve a starting place, a specific manner of motion, and an ending place. Based on previous work, we expect children to remember the ending place better than the starting place, but we don't know how their memory of motion types will fit in. We are especially interested in how children's memory is related to preferences for how to liguistically describe the same scenes. For this study, we use short animated movies involving a monkey and a frog.
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Social Register |
Age range: 3 through 5 year olds
This series of studies is looking at the fact that we talk differently to different people: for example, we talk differently to babies than we do to doctors. These different speech styles are called "registers". We are investigating how children's knowledge of this fact develops. We are interested in when they are able to guess who someone is speaking to based on the register they are using, which register they understand better, and what kinds of explanations they provide for why different people used different registers. For these studies, children listen to speech files on a computer and point to pictures.
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Action Quantities |
Age range: 4 year olds
This study is looking at how children use language to help them decide how to think about an event. There are two kinds of language cues that children can use to help them decide what perspective to take on an event -- they can use the specific words in the sentence (such as "throw" or "wash") and they can also use grammatical elements, such as sentence structure and verb endings (such as the "-ing" and "-ed" in "throwing" and "washed"). In our task, we different language descriptions to see if we can encourage them to think about events in terms of either numerical quantity (the number of times the event happened) or continuous quantity (such as the total amount of time the event took). For this study, we use short animated movies on a computer showing people doing familiar actions.
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