Linguistics Study

Today we did something fun that we hadn't done for a couple of years: participated in a linguistics study at UNC. I have signed both girls up for research purposes ever since they were born, . . . and it's just really fun to go and participate, spend the morning on campus, talk about the future, and get free parking. : ) Anyway, here's what they told me about this particular study: "The purpose of this research study is to learn about how children learn two types of verbs that seem to be similar in some linguistic contexts, but cannot appear in all the same
types of sentences. Previous research has suggested that young children do not always
distinguish verbs in the same way that adults do. The purpose of this study is to
understand how children acquire the adult-like distinction between the two verb classes
under consideration." Often it seemed to be about children giving inanimate objects human qualities through verb usage. They also told us that "Your child will be asked to listen to some age-appropriate stories together with an experimenter and some puppets. The puppets will make comments about what happened in the stories, and your child’s task will be to judge whether the puppet’s comment sounds “right” or sounds “silly.” Some of the puppet’s comments will be “silly” by being factually wrong, while other comments may be grammatically wrong (e.g., The boy is bounce the ball) or semantically anomalous (e.g., The ball is bouncing the boy). The
sessions will be videotaped for data collection purposes." Therefore, we were in the language lab with the researcher, the puppeteer, a camera, and a whole bunch of toys and pictures. The main puppet was Marvin.
Here is a close-up of Leia and Marvin. Leia LOVED Marvin. ; )
This study contained about 100 different stories/pictures all of 20 seconds or less. What would happen is the researcher would tell a story using figures (as above) or show Leia a picture. Then Marvin the monkey would react to the story or picture. If Marvin reacted correctly, Leia was supposed to feed him the orange. (Marvin really liked oranges.) If Marvin reacted incorrectly, Leia was supposed to feed him the lettuce. (Marvin wasn't a big fan of the lettuce.) This is a good picture that shows it all.
For example, they showed Marvin a picture of an apple and he said, "The apple wants to be red." And Leia would look at the researcher like this and hand Marvin the lettuce. ; ) Since this is a study of language, there really wasn't any such thing as a child getting an answer "wrong," but I guess you could call it that when their perception wasn't quite correct. In other words, when Marvin got the orange when he was really supposed to get the lettuce. And it was the MOST interesting when this happened in regards to Leia Rose. For example, one picture was of Ernie and Bert with a little radio playing music. The researcher said, "Bert turned on the radio to listen to the music, but Ernie said, 'Bert, that music is too loud, could you turn the music down a bit? It's hurting my ears.'" Marvin said, "Ernie asked the music to get softer." And Leia fed Marvin the orange! Oh no! ; ) There was another one that was a story that went like this, "A hippo, a tiger, and a lion went for a walk. After a while the hippo said, 'My feet are hurting me! Tiger, would you mind rubbing my feet?' The tiger replied, 'I feel too tired right now. Why don't you ask the Lion to do it?' So the hippo asked the lion to rub his feet, and the lion did." Marvin said, "The lion asked the hippo to rub his feet." And Leia fed Marvin the orange! Oh no! ; ) Of course, that was two out of a hundred or so. It was just so interesting when her perception was different than an adult's! They said that Leia Rose had such a great attention span they did ALL of the scenarios with her! Then they gave her some crayons and stickers. : ) Leia asked if they could do some more. They said no. Ha!