The visual world paradigm for indexing phonological and semantic lexical co-activation in children: A methodological overview

The visual world paradigm (VWP) can be used to understand the time-course of activation of words and their competitors during spoken word recognition. A target word is presented auditorily (e.g., ‘candy’) while the target word and its competitors are presented visually. Competitors are words that may be activated briefly despite not being the target word. They can sound similar (e.g., ‘candle’), have related meaning (e.g., ‘pie’), or be related in some other way to a presented word (e.g., perceptually related such as a ‘rope’ and ‘snake’). The visual world paradigm allows the researcher to examine what words, from a fixed set of images on the screen, the participant is considering. This is time locked in milliseconds, typically starting from the target word presentation and before the participant has fully recognized the target word. There are many linguistic applications and variations to the task. In our manuscript, we describe a 4-image version of the VWP for use in a study with French-speaking children between ages 3-7 years old. Our task allows for the examination of both phonological and semantic co-activation of auditorily presented words. Children complete 36 test trials during the experiment. During a test trial, a set of 4 images are presented equidistant from the center of the screen. One image is the ‘target’ and the other three images are either competitors (phonologically or semantically related) or unrelated to the target. Children hear the label of the target image. In our version, children are also instructed to point at the corresponding image to establish word choice. Children’s looks to the images are indexed during the first 2000 ms after the onset of the auditory word. Analyses examine children’s looks, not just to the labeled target image, but also to the competitors. This gives researchers insight into the activation and inhibition of presented and competing words during the time-course of spoken word recognition

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time Pre-data collection manuscript for peer-review The ManyBabies 5 Team

International audienceMuch of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants' visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants' visual preferences are poorly understood, and differences in the expression of preferences can be difficult to interpret. In this large-scale study, we test predictions from the Hunter and Ames model of infants' visual preferences. 1 We investigate the effects of three factors predicted by this model to determine infants' preference for novel versus familiar stimuli: age, stimulus familiarity, and stimulus complexity. Drawing from a large and diverse sample of infant participants (N = XX), this study will provide crucial empirical evidence for a robust and generalizable model of infant visual preferences, leading to a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants' responses in common behavioral paradigms. Moreover, our findings will guide future studies that rely on infants' visual preferences to measure cognitive and social processes

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, and differences in the expression of preferences can be difficult to interpret. In this large-scale study, we test predictions from the Hunter and Ames model of infants' visual preferences. We investigate the effects of three factors predicted by this model to determine infants’ preference for novel versus familiar stimuli: age, stimulus familiarity, and stimulus complexity. Drawing from a large and diverse sample of infant participants (minimum expected sample size N = 1,280), this study aims to provide empirical evidence for a robust and generalizable model of infant visual preferences, leading to a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants’ responses in common behavioral paradigms. Moreover, we hope that our findings will guide future studies that rely on infants' visual preferences to measure cognitive and social processes