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These studies take place at our lab at the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ, where you will have free parking and be welcomed into the lab by a researcher. Your child will participate in a game or activity, or watch a short video, all of which are designed to be engaging for children. Parents and children are together for the full study session, which tends to be around 30 minutes.  

In one of our in-lab studies, we are asking whether toddlers interpret words different depending on whether they hear them from a child or an adult. Toddlers see a video in which either a child or adult is talking about various objects. We measure how long toddlers look at the objects when they hear the child or adult voice describing them. Studies like this tell us how well toddlers understand the speech of other children, and whether they know anything specific about the way other children talk!  

Finding it hard to imagine what a lab visit is like? Click the link below to see a step-by-step of how we run our in-lab studies!

In these studies, our researchers connect with you on a video chat so that you and your child can easily participate from the comfort of your home! During the Zoom video call, our researchers will walk your child through a short story or game and ask them a few simple questions that can be answered through pointing, yes/no responses, or short explanations.  

In one of our online studies, we are asking whether English-Mandarin bilingual kids have preferences for more grammatical speakers and whether these preferences are the same in both of their languages. Children hear pairs of speakers, one of whom makes some grammatical errors when they talk. So far, it looks like bilingual children are very good at detecting grammar mistakes, but they care more about these errors in Mandarin than in English. This is possibly because in the KW area, children hear more non-native English speakers than non-native Mandarin speakers. We are still running this study, but so far the results suggest that bilingual children's choices about who to learn from are influenced by a mix of things like the languages they hear, the people they interact with, and how old they are! 

In addition to our in-person and online studies, we also have study packages that you can complete with your child at home! Each study package contains a recording device, a special t-shirt to place the recording device in, and 3-4 activities for you to complete with your child. In these studies, we have been looking at how children talk in different situations. 

In one of our take-home studies, we looked at how older siblings modified their speech for their younger siblings, compared to the way they spoke to their parents. We asked families to do a picture completion game together where they directed one another about how to complete the pictures. We found that older siblings did indeed talk to their younger siblings in a special way! They used a higher pitch, more attention-grabbing words (e.g., “Look,” “See,” their sibling’s name), and fewer disfluencies (e.g., “uhh,” “um”) when speaking to their younger sibling compared to when speaking to their parents!