Recent BUCLD talk on November 5 by Daoxin Li, Iris Zhong, and Katie Schuler: Adapting infant looking time paradigms for the web.
Paradigms like head-turn preference procedure (HPP) have been crucial to the study of language acquisition in infants, but remain difficult to conduct due to the highly controlled lab settings they require. While researchers have successfully adapted preferential looking paradigms to collect data from infants over the web, paradigms like HPP remain restricted to the lab. In the present study, we provide the first demonstration that HPP can also be adapted successfully for web data collection. To illustrate, we conducted an online replication of Shi, Cutler, Werker and Cruickshank’s (2006) Experiment 1, which employed the central-fixation adaptation of HPP to determine whether functors like ‘the’ facilitate the extraction of novel nouns in 11 month olds. We leveraged the Lookit platform (https://lookit.mit.edu/) to recruit and run this experiment online. Our results indicate new opportunities for infant studies during the pandemic and in the future.