But traditionally, this paradigm required participants to visit the lab, where children would be tested in a controlled environment (i.e., a quiet room with minimal distractions), using the same equipment across participants (i.e., the same screen, speakers, and video camera). The IPLP has been used for decades in labs across the world, and has contributed to our understanding of critical skills within language acquisition such as word learning ( Hollich et al., 2000 Halberda, 2003 Newman et al., 2018) and word comprehension ( Fernald et al., 2001 Swingley and Aslin, 2002 Houston-Price et al., 2007 Morini and Newman, 2019), in children as young as 6 months ( Tincoff and Jusczyk, 1999 Bergelson and Swingley, 2012). The IPLP measures the speed and/or accuracy of children's looking patterns to objects on a screen, and since eye-gaze is an overt behavioral response that is present early in life, it does not rely heavily on motor control ( Golinkoff et al., 2013). While initially, the study of child language had been restricted to the examination of early speech productions ( Brown, 1973 Shatz, 1978), the introduction of new testing techniques, such as the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm (IPLP) ( Golinkoff et al., 1987) would allow researchers to explore processes associated with language acquisition, even before children can produce words. Over the last 50 years we have seen important shifts toward new testing paradigms that would help shape theories of language acquisition. This means that while songs may be beneficial for increasing child engagement, spoken sentences may be best for supporting deep level learning of language concepts. In fact, preschoolers show improved word-learning performance for items that were trained in a spoken sentence compared to items that were trained in a song. We provide evidence suggesting that while songs may help increase attention during a particular task, greater attention does not lead to greater learning.

Additionally, we use this methodological approach to examine a topic that has gained popularity in recent years-the role of music and songs on vocabulary learning.

Our data support the feasibility of collecting remote eye-gaze data with young children, and present it as a viable alternative for conducting developmental language research when in-person interactions with participants cannot take place. We provide feasibility and precision data by comparing performance in an in-person version of the study (conducted under controlled conditions in the lab), with performance in a virtual version in which participants completed the testing procedure from home. This article evaluates a testing procedure for collecting eye-gaze data with toddlers and preschoolers during a word-learning task. Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, United States.

Endnote for mac student udel