Using Tablets to Collect Data From Young Children

Effects of semantic and pragmatic factors on preschool children's negation-triggered inferences on plausible alternatives

Negation-triggered inferences are universal across human languages. Hearing "This is not X" should logically lead to the inference that all elements other than X constitute possible alternatives. However, not all logically possible alternatives are equally accessible in the real world. To qualify as a plausible alternative, it must share with the negated element as many similarities as possible, and the most plausible one is often from the same taxonomic category as the negated element. The current article reports on two experiments that investigated the development of preschool children's ability to infer plausible alternatives triggered by negation. Experiment 1 showed that in a context where children were required to determine the most plausible alternative to the negated element, the 4- and 5-year-olds, but not the 3-year-olds, exhibited a robust preference for the taxonomic associates. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds considered all the complement set members as equally possible alternatives in a context where they were not explicitly required to evaluate the plausibility of different candidates. Taken together, our findings reveal interesting developmental continuity in preschool children's ability to make inferences about plausible alternatives triggered by negation. We discuss the potential semantic and pragmatic factors that contribute to children's emerging awareness of typical alternatives triggered by negative expressions.

Connecting the tots: Strong looking-pointing correlations in preschoolers' word learning and implications for continuity in language development

How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes 914 pointing, looking children (451 female, varied ethnicities, 2.5-6.5 years, dates: 2009-2019) in 36 word- or sound-learning experiments with two-alternative test trials. Looking proportions and pointing accuracy correlated strongly (r = .7). Counter to the "looks first" hypothesis, looks were not sensitive to incipient knowledge that pointing missed: when pointing is at chance, looking proportions are also. Results suggest one possible path forward for assessing continuous developmental change. Methodological best practices are discussed.

Cognitive control in infancy: Attentional predictors using a tablet-based measure

Cognitive control is a predictor of later-life outcomes and may underpin higher order executive processes. The present study examines the development of early cognitive control during the first 24-month. We evaluated a tablet-based assessment of cognitive control among infants aged 18- and 24-month. We also examined concurrent and longitudinal associations between attentional disengagement, general cognitive skills and cognitive control. Participants (N = 60, 30 female) completed the tablet-task at 18- and 24-month of age. Attentional disengagement and general cognitive development were assessed at 5-, 8-, 12-, 18- and 24-month using an eye-tracking measure and the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL), respectively. The cognitive control task demonstrated good internal consistency, sensitivity to age-related change in performance and stable individual differences. No associations were found between infant cognitive control and MSEL scores longitudinally or concurrently. The eye-tracking task revealed that slower attentional disengagement at 8-month, but faster disengagement at 18-month, predicted higher cognitive control scores at 24-month. This task may represent a useful tool for measuring emergent cognitive control. The multifaceted relationship between attention and infant cognitive control suggests that the rapid development of the attentional system in infancy results in distinct attentional skills, at different ages, being relevant for cognitive control development.

Guidelines and best practices for assessing young children remotely

Given the recent rise in the use of remote assessments to collect data from young children, researchers and practitioners would benefit from guidance on best practices within the field. Based on our experiences with assessing over 600 preschoolers remotely, our research team provides a set of main principles to guide professionals to successfully create and operationalize systems for remote assessment. Guidelines include detailed information about how to choose a technology platform, select and use online assessments, and how to adapt traditional tasks for remote use. We also note the challenges inherent in using certain types of tasks, provide tips for scheduling remote sessions, and offer advice for how to promote children's engagement throughout the assessment process.

TANGO: A reliable, open-source, browser-based task to assess individual differences in gaze understanding in 3 to 5-year-old children and adults

Traditional measures of social cognition used in developmental research often lack satisfactory psychometric properties and are not designed to capture variation between individuals. Here, we present the TANGO (Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open); a brief (approx. 5-10min), reliable, open-source task to quantify individual differences in the understanding of gaze cues. Localizing the attentional focus of an agent is crucial in inferring their mental states, building common ground, and thus, supporting cooperation. Our interactive browser-based task works across devices and enables in-person and remote testing. The implemented spatial layout allows for discrete and continuous measures of participants' click imprecision and is easily adaptable to different study requirements. Our task measures inter-individual differences in a child (N = 387) and an adult (N = 236) sample. Our two study versions and data collection modes yield comparable results that show substantial developmental gains: the older children are, the more accurately they locate the target. High internal consistency and test-retest reliability estimates underline that the captured variation is systematic. Associations with social-environmental factors and language skills speak to the validity of the task. This work shows a promising way forward in studying individual differences in social cognition and will help us explore the structure and development of our core social-cognitive processes in greater detail.

An individual differences perspective on pragmatic abilities in the preschool years

Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three- to 5-year-old German-speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Individual differences in pragmatic abilities are important to understanding variation in language development. Research in this domain lacks a precise theoretical framework and psychometrically high-quality measures. We present six tasks capturing a wide range of pragmatic abilities with excellent re-test reliability. We use a computational cognitive model to provide a substantive theory of individual differences in pragmatic abilities.

The Potential of Digital Screening Tools for Childhood ADHD in School Environments: A Preliminary Study

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent developmental disorder in children. However, accurately identifying ADHD in early childhood remains a crucial challenge. Electronic health (e-health) systems offer promising possibilities to enhance the diagnostic process for ADHD, particularly concerning the executive functions (EFs) that play a direct role. This study aims to validate an evidence-based tool for screening ADHD through EFs in the school environment. The tool, named Sendero Gris, is designed for tablet devices and is based on a previously validated test with the same name. To ensure its validity, a comparison was made between the results obtained from the tool to be validated and the original format of the test. The analysis revealed no statistically significant differences between the two approaches at a 90% confidence level (p-value = 0.49). Moreover, a user experience study focusing on usability was conducted to assess the children's inclination to use the developed tool, yielding highly positive results. The implementation of Sendero Gris on a tablet device, with its objective and versatile nature, seems to maintain the potential of the original format as a screening tool for ADHD.

The Influence of Shyness on Language Assessment

PURPOSE

The goal of this study is to examine how shyness affects a child's performance on language assessments that vary in sociability. We hypothesized that accuracy on language tasks would be driven by shyness such that shyer children would perform better on nonsociable tasks compared to sociable tasks.

METHOD

The procedures followed a quasi-experimental design. One hundred twenty-two participants, ages 17-42 months and varying in their temperament, each underwent a series of three language tasks. The order of tasks was randomized, and each task varied in the social interaction required: a looking task, a pointing task, and a production task. Data were collected via Zoom, and parents reported their child's shyness level via the Early Child Behavior Questionnaire.

RESULTS

Shyness was compared with participants' accuracy across the three tests while controlling for age and vocabulary percentile. There were significant differences in children's performance across the tasks, with respect to shyness. Shyer children performed worse on the production task compared to less shy children. All children did well on the pointing task regardless of shyness level, but performance was more nuanced on the looking task such that shyer children were at times more accurate but also less likely to respond in general.

CONCLUSIONS

As shown by these results, shyer and less shy children respond differentially to methods of language assessment that vary in sociability. It is important for clinicians to acknowledge shyness when choosing an appropriate assessment of children's language. Future direction includes assessing performance on standardized assessments.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23845521.

Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition

The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We first present how we created the database, its features and structure, and associated tools for processing and accessing infant eye-tracking datasets. Using these tools, we then work through two illustrative examples to show how researchers can use Peekbank to interrogate theoretical and methodological questions about children's developing word recognition ability.

Can we measure individual differences in cognitive measures reliably via smartphones? A comparison of the flanker effect across device types and samples

Research deployed via the internet and administered via smartphones could have access to more diverse samples than lab-based research. Diverse samples could have relatively high variation in their traits and so yield relatively reliable measurements of individual differences in these traits. Several cognitive tasks that originated from the experimental research tradition have been reported to yield relatively low reliabilities (Hedge et al., 2018) in samples with restricted variance (students). This issue could potentially be addressed by smartphone-mediated administration in diverse samples. We formulate several criteria to determine whether a cognitive task is suitable for individual differences research on commodity smartphones: no very brief or precise stimulus timing, relative response times (RTs), a maximum of two response options, and a small number of graphical stimuli. The flanker task meets these criteria. We compared the reliability of individual differences in the flanker effect across samples and devices in a preregistered study. We found no evidence that a more diverse sample yields higher reliabilities. We also found no evidence that commodity smartphones yield lower reliabilities than commodity laptops. Hence, diverse samples might not improve reliability above student samples, but smartphones may well measure individual differences with cognitive tasks reliably. Exploratively, we examined different reliability coefficients, split-half reliabilities, and the development of reliability estimates as a function of task length.

Pragmatics aid referent disambiguation and word learning in young children and adults

How do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children's attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned whether children's disambiguation leads to long-term learning or rather indicates an attentional shift in the moment of the conversation. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults. Participants were presented with unknown objects as potential referents for a novel word. Across conditions, we manipulated whether the only difference between both objects was their relative novelty to the participant or whether, in addition, participants were provided with pragmatic information that indicated which object the speaker referred to. We tested participants' immediate referent selection and their retention after 5 min. Results revealed that when given common ground information both age groups inferred the correct referent with high success and enhanced behavioral certainty. Without this information, object novelty alone did not guide their selection. After 5 min, adults remembered their previous selections above chance in both conditions, while children only showed reliable learning in the pragmatic condition. The pattern of results indicates how pragmatics may aid referent disambiguation and learning in both adults and young children. From early ontogeny on, children's social-cognitive understanding may guide their communicative interactions and support their language acquisition. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We tested how 2-3-year-olds and adults resolve referential ambiguity without any lexical cues. In the pragmatic context both age groups disambiguated novel word-object-mappings, while object novelty alone did not guide their referent selection. In the pragmatic context, children also showed increased certainty in disambiguation and retained new word-object-mappings over time. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on whether children learn words on the basis of domain-specific constraints, lower-level associative mechanisms, or pragmatic inferences.

Coping with dialects from birth: Role of variability on infants' early language development. Insights from Norwegian dialects

Previous research suggests that exposure to accent variability can affect toddlers' familiar word recognition and word comprehension. The current preregistered study addressed the gap in knowledge on early language development in infants exposed to two dialects from birth and assessed the role of dialect similarity in infants' word recognition and comprehension. A 12-month-old Norwegian-learning infants, exposed to native Norwegian parents speaking the same or two Norwegian dialects, took part in two eye-tracking tasks, assessing familiar word form recognition and word comprehension. Their parents' speech was assessed for similarity by native Norwegian speakers. First, in contrast to previous research, our results revealed no listening preference for words over nonwords in both monodialectal and bidialectal infants, suggesting potential language-specific differences in the onset of word recognition. Second, the results showed evidence for word comprehension in monodialectal infants, but not in bidialectal infants, suggesting that exposure to dialectal variability impacts early word acquisition. Third, perceptual similarity between parental dialects tendentially facilitated bidialectal infants' word recognition and comprehension. Forth, the results revealed a strong correlation between the raters and parents' assessment of similarity between dialects, indicating that parental estimations can be reliably used to assess infants' speech variability at home. Finally, our results revealed a strong relationship between word recognition and comprehension in monodialectal infants and the absence of such a relationship in bidialectal infants, suggesting that either these two skills do not necessarily align in infants exposed to more variable input, or that the alignment might occur at a later stage.

Evaluation of a tablet-based assessment tool for measuring cognition among children 4-6 years of age in Ghana

OBJECTIVES

To investigate several basic psychometric properties, including construct, convergent and discriminant validity, of the tablet-based Rapid Assessment of Cognitive and Emotional Regulation (RACER) among children aged 4-6 years in Ghana.

METHODS

We investigated whether RACER tasks administered to children in Ghana could successfully reproduce expected patterns of performance previously found in high-income countries on similar tasks assessing inhibitory control (e.g., slower responses on inhibition trials), declarative memory (e.g., higher accuracy on previously seen items), and procedural memory (e.g., faster responses on sequence blocks). Next, we assessed the validity of declarative memory and inhibitory control scores by examining associations of these scores with corresponding paper-based test scores and increasing child age. Lastly, we examined whether RACER was more sensitive than paper-based tests to environmental risk factors common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

RESULTS

Of the 966 children enrolled, more than 96% completed the declarative memory and inhibitory control tasks; however, around 30% of children were excluded from data analysis on the procedural memory task due to missing more than half of trials. The performance of children in Ghana replicated previously documented patterns of performance. RACER inhibitory control accuracy score was significantly correlated with child age (r (929) = .09, p = .007). However, our findings did not support other hypotheses.

CONCLUSIONS

The high task completion rates and replication of expected patterns support that certain RACER sub-tasks are feasible for measuring child cognitive development in LMIC settings. However, this study did not provide evidence to support that RACER is a valid tool to capture meaningful individual differences among children aged 4-6 years in Ghana.

Logometro®: The psychometric properties of a norm-referenced digital battery for language assessment of Greek-speaking 4-7 years old children

In educational and clinical settings, few norm-referenced tests have been utilized until now usually focusing on a single or a few language subcomponents, along with very few language rating scales for parents and educators. The need for a comprehensive language assessment tool for preschool and early school years children which could form the basis for valid and reliable screening and diagnostic decisions, led to the development of a new norm-referenced digital tool called Logometro®. The aim of the present study is to describe Logometro® as well as its psychometric characteristics. Logometro® evaluates an array of oral language skills across the different language domains such as phonological awareness, listening comprehension, vocabulary knowledge (receptive and expressive), narrative speech, morphological awareness, pragmatics, as well emergent literacy skills (letter sound knowledge and invented writing) in Greek-speaking 4-7 years old children. More specifically, Logometro® has been designed in order to: (a) map individual language development paths as well as difficulties, (b) provide a descriptive profile of children's oral language and emergent literacy skills, and (c) assist in the identification of children who are at risk for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD). The sample consisted of 926 children aged from 4 to 7 years, which were recruited from diverse geographical provinces and represented a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds in Greece. Eight hundred participants were typically developing children (N boys = 384 and N girls = 416), 126 children (N SLI = 44 and N SLD = 82) represented children with Special Educational Needs, and 126 children were typically developing peers matched for gender and age with the clinical groups. The administration lasted 90 min, depending on the participant's age and competence. Validity (construct, criterion, convergent, discriminant, and predictive) as well as internal consistency and test-retest reliability were assessed. Results indicated that Logometro® is characterized by good psychometric properties and can constitute a norm-referenced battery of oral language and emergent literacy skills. It could be used to inform the professionals as well as the researchers about a child's language strengths and weaknesses and form the basis on which they can design an appropriate individualized intervention if needed.

Inconsistent flanker congruency effects across stimulus types and age groups: A cautionary tale

The flanker task is a common measure of selective attention and response competition across populations, age groups, and experiential contexts. Adapting it for different uses often involves changing methodological features that are rarely empirically compared with the previous design. This paper presents an example of how typical methodological changes can differentially elicit congruency effects across age groups. We compared two flanker tasks, using direction stimuli on a laptop versus color stimuli on a tablet, in young children (2-7 years; Experiment 1), older children (6-10 years; Experiment 2a), and adults (19-23 years; Experiment 2b). Young children showed the expected congruency effects in the direction task, and one year later a subset of the sample completed the color task, also showing congruency effects. Longitudinal comparisons showed no difference in the congruency effect across tasks, but nearly half of the sample was excluded due to high error rates. To avoid excluding children with few correct trials, we modified a new measure, signed residual time, to incorporate correctness and reaction time per trial. With the larger sample, this measure showed no difference in congruency effects across tasks. To compare these tasks when completed within the same session, we tested older children and young adults in both tasks and found congruency effects in the direction task but not the color task. These results raise concern that tasks adapted for young children may not perform comparably in other samples, and we caution researchers to anticipate this possibility when modifying cognitive tasks.

Online Assessment of Motor, Cognitive, and Communicative Achievements in 4-Month-Old Infants

Remote methods for data collection allow us to quickly collect large amounts of data, offering several advantages as compared to in-lab administration. We investigated the applicability of an online assessment of motor, cognitive, and communicative development in 4-month-old infants based on several items of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, 3rd edition (BSID-III). We chose a subset of items which were representative of the typical developmental achievements at 4 months of age and that we could administer online with the help of the infant’s caregiver using materials which were easily available at home. Results showed that, in a sample of infants tested live (N = 18), the raw scores of the BSID-III were significantly correlated with the raw scores of a subset of items corresponding to those administered to a sample of infants tested online (N = 53). Moreover, for the “online” participants, the raw scores of the online assessment did not significantly differ from the corresponding scores of the “live” participants. These findings suggest that the online assessment was to some extent comparable to the live administration of the same items, thus representing a viable opportunity to remotely evaluate infant development when in-person assessment is not possible.

Mutual Exclusivity in Pragmatic Agents

One of the great challenges in word learning is that words are typically uttered in a context with many potential referents. Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents, which is taken to reflect a mutual exclusivity (ME) bias, forms a useful disambiguation mechanism. We study semantic learning in pragmatic agents-combining the Rational Speech Act model with gradient-based learning-and explore the conditions under which such agents show an ME bias. This approach provides a framework for investigating a pragmatic account of the ME bias in humans but also for building artificial agents that display an ME bias. A series of analyses demonstrates striking parallels between our model and human word learning regarding several aspects relevant to the ME bias phenomenon: online inference, long-term learning, and developmental effects. By testing different implementations, we find that two components, pragmatic online inference and incremental collection of evidence for one-to-one correspondences between words and referents, play an important role in modeling the developmental trajectory of the ME bias. Finally, we outline an extension of our model to a deep neural network architecture that can process more naturalistic visual and linguistic input. Until now, in contrast to children, deep neural networks have needed indirect access to (supposed to be novel) test inputs during training to display an ME bias. Our model is the first one to do so without using this manipulation.

Comparing Face-to-Face and Online Data Collection Methods in Preterm and Full-Term Children: An Exploratory Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the landscape for children's daily lives and the landscape for developmental psychology research. Pandemic-related restrictions have also significantly disrupted the traditional face-to-face methods with which developmental scientists produce research. Over the past year, developmental scientists have published on the best practices for online data collection methods; however, existing studies do not provide empirical evidence comparing online methods to face-to-face methods. In this study, we tested feasibility of online methods by examining performance on a battery of standardized and experimental cognitive assessments in a combined sample of 4- to 5-year-old preterm and full-term children, some of whom completed the battery face-to-face, and some of whom completed the battery online. First, we asked how children's performance differs between face-to-face and online format on tasks related to verbal comprehension, fluid reasoning, visual spatial, working memory, attention and executive functioning, social perception, and numerical skills. Out of eight tasks, we did not find reliable differences on five of them. Second, we explored the role of parent involvement in children's performance in the online format. We did not find a significant effect of parent involvement on children's performance. Exploratory analyses showed that the role of format did not vary for children at risk, specifically children born preterm. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature examining differences and similarities across various data collection methods, as well as literature surrounding online data collection for continuing developmental psychology research.

A Framework for Online Experimenter-Moderated Looking-Time Studies Assessing Infants' Linguistic Knowledge

Online data collection methods pose unique challenges and opportunities for infant researchers. Looking-time measures require relative timing precision to link eye-gaze behavior to stimulus presentation, particularly for tasks that require visual stimuli to be temporally linked to auditory stimuli, which may be disrupted when studies are delivered online. Concurrently, by widening potential geographic recruitment areas, online data collection may also provide an opportunity to diversify participant samples that are not possible given in-lab data collection. To date, there is limited information about these potential challenges and opportunities. In Study 1, twenty-one 23- to 26-month-olds participated in an experimenter-moderated looking-time paradigm that was administered via the video conferencing platform Zoom, attempting to recreate in-lab data collection using a looking-while-listening paradigm. Data collected virtually approximated results from in-lab samples of familiar word recognition, after minimal corrections to account for timing variability. We also found that the procedures were robust to a wide range of internet speeds, increasing the range of potential participants. However, despite the use of an online task, the participants in Study 1 were demographically unrepresentative, as typically observed with in-person studies in our geographic area. The potentially wider reach of online data collection methods presents an opportunity to recruit larger, more representative samples than those traditionally found in lab-based infant research, which is crucial for conducting generalizable human-subjects research. In Study 2, microtargeted Facebook advertisements for online studies were directed at two geographic locations that are comparable in population size but vary widely in demographic and socioeconomic factors. We successfully elicited sign-up responses from caregivers in neighborhoods that are far more diverse than the local University community in which we conduct our in-person studies. The current studies provide a framework for infancy researchers to conduct remote eye-gaze studies by identifying best practices for recruitment, design, and analysis. Moderated online data collection can provide considerable benefits to the diversification of infant research, with minimal impact on the timing precision and usability of the resultant data.

Isolated Sandbox Environment Architecture for Running Cognitive Psychological Experiments in Web Platforms

Web surveys are an integral part of the feedback of Internet services, a research tool for respondents, including in the field of health and psychology. Web technologies allow conducting research on large samples. For mental health, an important metric is reaction time in cognitive tests and in answering questions. The use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has increased markedly in web surveys, so the impact of device types and operating systems needs to be investigated. This article proposes an architectural solution aimed at reducing the effect of device variability on the results of cognitive psychological experiments. An experiment was carried out to formulate the requirements for software and hardware. Three groups of 1000 respondents were considered, corresponding to three types of computers and operating systems: Mobile Device, Legacy PC, and Modern PC. The results obtained showed a slight bias in the estimates for each group. It is noticed that the error for a group of devices differs both upward and downward for various tasks in a psychological experiment. Thus, for cognitive tests, in which the reaction time is critical, an architectural solution was synthesized for conducting psychological research in a web browser. The proposed architectural solution considers the characteristics of the device used by participants to undergo research in the web platform and allows to restrict access from devices that do not meet the specified criteria.

Improvements of Statistical Learning Skills Allow Older Children to Go Beyond Single-Hypothesis Testing When Learning Words

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis - and revise it if falsified by later information - or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word - novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

A Global Perspective on Testing Infants Online: Introducing ManyBabies-AtHome

Online testing holds great promise for infant scientists. It could increase participant diversity, improve reproducibility and collaborative possibilities, and reduce costs for researchers and participants. However, despite the rise of platforms and participant databases, little work has been done to overcome the challenges of making this approach available to researchers across the world. In this paper, we elaborate on the benefits of online infant testing from a global perspective and identify challenges for the international community that have been outside of the scope of previous literature. Furthermore, we introduce ManyBabies-AtHome, an international, multi-lab collaboration that is actively working to facilitate practical and technical aspects of online testing and address ethical concerns regarding data storage and protection, and cross-cultural variation. The ultimate goal of this collaboration is to improve the method of testing infants online and make it globally available.

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-5-year-old children's word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.

Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past research has shown that infants expect resources to be distributed fairly, prefer to interact with fair distributors, and evaluate others based on their fair and unfair resource allocations. In order to determine whether infants would intervene in third-party resource distributions by use of reward and punishment we developed a novel task. Sixteen-month-old infants were taught that one side of a touch screen produces reward (vocal statements expressing praise; giving a cookie), whereas the other side produces punishment when touched (vocal statements expressing admonishment; taking away a cookie). After watching videos in which one actor distributed resources fairly and another actor distributed resources unfairly, participants' screen touches on the reward and punishment panels while the fair and unfair distributors appeared on screen were recorded. Infants touched the reward side significantly more than the punishment side when presented with the fair distributor but touched the screen sides equally when the unfair distributor was shown. Control experiments revealed no evidence of reward or punishment when infants saw food items they liked and disliked, or individuals uninvolved in the resource distribution events. These results provide the earliest evidence that infants are able to spontaneously intervene in socio-moral situations by rewarding positive actions.

Processes and pathways in development via digital media: Examples from word learning

Word learning unfolds over multiple, cascading pathways which support in-the-moment processing and learning. The process is refined with each exposure to a word, and exposures to new words occur across a variety of forms and contexts. However, as children are exposed to more and more digital media, the ways in which children encounter, learn, and build on their vocabulary is also shifting. These shifts represent changes in context, content, and at the level of the child that can lead to negative outcomes. Less work, however, has discussed what these differences mean for how things change in the underlying developmental cascade and learning processes. Here, we suggest that the increasing presence of digital media may shift the developmental pathways for learning (the chain of events that support future learning) but not necessarily the developmental processes (the mechanisms underlying learning). Moreover, the interaction of the two may lead to different behavior and outcomes for learning in a digital era. We argue it is imperative for researchers to not only study how digital media differs from everyday learning, but directly measure if the well-worn pathways, processes, and variables found with decades of research with real items translate to a digital media era.

Word learning from a tablet app: Toddlers perform better in a passive context

In recent years, the popularity of tablets has skyrocketed and there has been an explosive growth in apps designed for children. Howhever, many of these apps are released without tests for their effectiveness. This is worrying given that the factors influencing children's learning from touchscreen devices need to be examined in detail. In particular, it has been suggested that children learn less from passive video viewing relative to equivalent live interaction, which would have implications for learning from such digital tools. However, this so-called video deficit may be reduced by allowing children greater influence over their learning environment. Across two touchscreen-based experiments, we examined whether 2- to 4-year-olds benefit from actively choosing what to learn more about in a digital word learning task. We designed a tablet study in which "active" participants were allowed to choose which objects they were taught the label of, while yoked "passive" participants were presented with the objects chosen by their active peers. We then examined recognition of the learned associations across different tasks. In Experiment 1, children in the passive condition outperformed those in the active condition (n = 130). While Experiment 2 replicated these findings in a new group of Malay-speaking children (n = 32), there were no differences in children's learning or recognition of the novel word-object associations using a more implicit looking time measure. These results suggest that there may be performance costs associated with active tasks designed as in the current study, and at the very least, there may not always be systematic benefits associated with active learning in touchscreen-based word learning tasks. The current studies add to the evidence that educational apps need to be evaluated before release: While children might benefit from interactive apps under certain conditions, task design and requirements need to consider factors that may detract from successful performance.

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

In conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history (common ground). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2- to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. In a tablet-based game, children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun "it" as referring to another member of the same category. In Study 2, only 4-year-olds interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between ages 2 and 5.

Syntactic Cues Help Disambiguate Objects Referred to With Count Nouns: Illustration With Malay Children

Children employ multiple cues to identify the referent of a novel word. Novel words are often embedded in sentences and children have been shown to use syntactic cues to differentiate between types of words (adjective vs. nouns) and between types of nouns (count vs. mass nouns). In this study, we show that children learning Malay (N = 67), a numeral classifier language, can use syntactic cues to perform even finer-grained disambiguation-between count nouns. The manipulation of congruence between lexical and syntactic cues reveals a clear developmental trajectory: while 5-year-olds use predominantly lexical cues, older children increasingly rely on syntactic cues, such that by 7 years of age, they disambiguate between objects referred to with count nouns using syntactic rather than lexical cues.

Continuous developmental change explains discontinuities in word learning

Cognitive development is often characterized in terms of discontinuities, but these discontinuities can sometimes be apparent rather than actual and can arise from continuous developmental change. To explore this idea, we use as a case study the finding by Stager and Werker (1997) that children's early ability to distinguish similar sounds does not automatically translate into word learning skills. Early explanations proposed that children may not be able to encode subtle phonetic contrasts when learning novel word meanings, thus suggesting a discontinuous/stage-like pattern of development. However, later work has revealed (e.g., through using more precise testing methods) that children do encode such contrasts, thus favoring a continuous pattern of development. Here, we propose a probabilistic model that represents word knowledge in a graded fashion and characterizes developmental change as improvement in the precision of this graded knowledge. Our model explained previous findings in the literature and provided a new prediction - the referents' visual similarity modulates word learning accuracy. The models' predictions were corroborated by human data collected from both preschool children and adults. The broader impact of this work is to show that computational models, such as ours, can help us explore the extent to which episodes of cognitive development that are typically thought of as discontinuities may emerge from simpler, continuous mechanisms.

The role of developmental change and linguistic experience in the mutual exclusivity effect

Given a novel word and a familiar and a novel referent, children have a bias to assume the novel word refers to the novel referent. This bias - often referred to as "Mutual Exclusivity" (ME) - is thought to be a potentially powerful route through which children might learn new word meanings, and, consequently, has been the focus of a large amount of empirical study and theorizing. Here, we focus on two aspects of the bias that have received relatively little attention in the literature: Development and experience. A successful theory of ME will need to provide an account for why the strength of the effect changes with the age of the child. We provide a quantitative description of the change in the strength of the bias across development, and investigate the role that linguistic experience plays in this developmental change. We first summarize the current body of empirical findings via a meta-analysis, and then present two experiments that examine the relationship between a child's amount of linguistic experience and the strength of the ME bias. We conclude that the strength of the bias varies dramatically across development and that linguistic experience is likely one causal factor contributing to this change. In the General Discussion, we describe how existing theories of ME can account for our findings, and highlight the value of computational modeling for future theorizing.

The role of salience in young children's processing of ad hoc implicatures

Language comprehension often requires making implicatures. For example, inferring that "I ate some of the cookies" implicates that the speaker ate some but not all (scalar implicatures), and "I ate the chocolate chip cookies" where there are both chocolate chip cookies and raisin cookies in the context implicates that the speaker ate the chocolate chip cookies but not both the chocolate chip and raisin cookies (ad hoc implicatures). Children's ability to make scalar implicatures develops at around 5 years of age, with ad hoc implicatures emerging somewhat earlier. In the current work, using a time-sensitive tablet paradigm, we examined developmental gains in children's ad hoc implicature processing and found evidence for successful pragmatic inferences by children as young as 3 years in a supportive context and substantial developmental gains in inference computation from 2 to 5 years. We also tested whether one cause of younger children's (2-year-olds) consistent failure to make pragmatic inferences is their difficulty in inhibiting an alternative interpretation that is more salient than the target meaning (the salience hypothesis). Our findings support this hypothesis; younger children's failures with pragmatic inferences were related to effects of the salience mismatch between possible interpretations.

Conducting evaluation research with children exposed to violence: How technological innovations in methodologies and data collection may enhance the process

Research and program evaluation processes that engage children and youth are becoming much more common due to influences from children's rights and the acknowledgement that children have the capacity to contribute to research, both as participants and co-researchers (Roberts, 2017). Recent technological advances in the form of tablet and internet-based applications have provided researchers with additional methodological tools to better capture the voices and experiences of children and their caregivers (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2017). However, little has been written on the ways in which these new technological advances can improve research experiences for children who have been exposed to intimate partner and family violence, as well as other forms of traumatic experiences. This paper provides a review of current literature and a case study example of how one children's mental health agency has implemented tablet-based data collection procedures.

Promoting Replicability in Developmental Research Through Meta-analyses: Insights From Language Acquisition Research

Previous work suggests that key factors for replicability, a necessary feature for theory building, include statistical power and appropriate research planning. These factors are examined by analyzing a collection of 12 standardized meta-analyses on language development between birth and 5 years. With a median effect size of Cohen's d = .45 and typical sample size of 18 participants, most research is underpowered (range = 6%-99%; median = 44%); and calculating power based on seminal publications is not a suitable strategy. Method choice can be improved, as shown in analyses on exclusion rates and effect size as a function of method. The article ends with a discussion on how to increase replicability in both language acquisition studies specifically and developmental research more generally.

When a word is worth more than a picture: Words lower the threshold for object identification in 3-year-old children

A large literature shows strong developmental links between early language abilities and later cognitive abilities. We present evidence for one pathway by which language may influence cognition and development: by influencing how visual information is momentarily processed. Children were asked to identify a target in clutter and either saw a visual preview of the target or heard the basic-level name of the target. We hypothesized that the name of the target should activate category-relevant information and, thus, facilitate more rapid detection of the target amid distractors. Children who heard the name of the target before search were more likely to correctly identify the target at faster speeds of response, a result that supports the idea that words lower the threshold for target identification. This finding has significant implication for understanding the source of vocabulary-mediated individual differences in cognitive achievement and, more generally, for the relation between language and thought.

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Novelty Biases and Vocabulary Influence Known and Novel Referent Selection in 18-Month-Old Children and Associative Learning Models

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word-referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18-month-old children's performance on referent selection and retention with novel and known words. The results reveal a pervasive novelty bias on referent selection with both known and novel names and, across individual children, a negative correlation between attention to novelty and retention of new word-referent links. A computational model examines possible sources of the bias, suggesting novelty supports in-the-moment behavior but not retention. Together, results suggest that when lexical knowledge is weak, attention to novelty drives behavior, but alone does not sustain learning. Importantly, the results demonstrate that word learning may be driven, in part, by low-level perceptual processes.

Tablet-Based Working Memory Assessment in Children and Adolescents

Abstract. Working memory (WM) is a key predictor of academic success. Therefore, standardized tools for measuring WM are of critical importance. So far, WM tests in the German-speaking research community require one-to-one instruction, making WM assessment time- and resource-consuming. To ease assessment of WM, a tablet-based, group-administrable application for German-speaking children and adolescents was developed. The aim of the current study was to investigate the applicability, reliability, and validity of the word span, Corsi block, and word span backward tasks of the newly designed application for use with primary and secondary school children. The results indicated good internal consistency and satisfactory test–retest reliability for all three tasks. In addition, the results provide some indication of content and concurrent validity. We conclude that the application is a promising tool for the assessment of WM and has the potential for resource-saving collection of developmental data in large-scale studies.

Looking Tasks Online: Utilizing Webcams to Collect Video Data from Home

Online experimentation is emerging as a new methodology within classical data acquisition in psychology. It allows for easy, fast, broad, and cheap data conduction from the comfort of people’s homes. To add another method to the array of available tools, here we used recent developments in web technology to investigate the technical feasibility of online HyperText Markup Language-5/JavaScript-based video data recording. We employed a preferential looking task with children between 4 and 24 months. Parents and their children participated from home through a three-stage process: First, interested adults registered and took pictures through a webcam-based photo application. In the second step, we edited the pictures and integrated them into the design. Lastly, participants returned to the website and the video data acquisition took place through their webcam. In sum, we were able to create and employ the video recording application with participants as young as 4 months old. Quality-wise, no participant had to be removed due to the framerate or quality of videos and only 7% of data was excluded due to behavioral factors (lack of concentration). Results-wise, interrater reliability of rated looking side (left/right) showed a high agreement between raters, Fleiss’ Kappa, κ = 0.97, which can be translated to sufficient data quality for further analyses. With regard to on-/off-screen attention attribution, we found that children lost interest after about 10 s after trial onset using a static image presentation or 60 s total experimental time. Taken together, we were able to show that online video data recording is possible and viable for developmental psychology and beyond.

U Can Touch This: How Tablets Can Be Used to Study Cognitive Development

New technological devices, particularly those with touch screens, have become virtually omnipresent over the last decade. Practically from birth, children are now surrounded by smart phones and tablets. Despite being our constant companions, little is known about whether these tools can be used not only for entertainment, but also to collect reliable scientific data. Tablets may prove particularly useful for collecting behavioral data from those children (1-10 years), who are, for the most part, too old for studies based on looking times and too young for classical psychophysical testing. Here, we analyzed data from six studies that utilized touch screen tablets to deliver experimental paradigms in developmental psychology. In studies 1 and 2, we employed a simple sorting and recall task with children from the ages of 2-8. Study 3 (ages 9 and 10) extended these tasks by increasing the difficulty of the stimuli and adding a staircase-based perception task. A visual search paradigm was used in study 4 (ages 2-5), while 1- to 3-year-olds were presented with an extinction learning task in study 5. In study 6, we used a simple visuo-spatial paradigm to obtain more details about the distribution of reaction times on touch screens over all ages. We collected data from adult participants in each study as well, for comparison purposes. We analyzed these data sets in regard to four metrics: self-reported tablet usage, completeness of data, accuracy of responses and response times. In sum, we found that children from the age of two onwards are very capable of interacting with tablets, are able to understand the respective tasks and are able to use tablets to register their answers accordingly. Results from all studies reiterated the advantages of data collection through tablets: ease of use, high portability, low-cost, and high levels of engagement for children. We illustrate the great potential of conducting psychological studies in young children using tablets, and also discuss both methodological challenges and their potential solutions.