On-line and implicit measurements of language and cognitive processing in children

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This proposal addresses fundamental and long-standing questions about the cognitive systems underlying human development in new and innovative ways. These questions include how children acquire language rapidly and effortlessly, how they begin to remember the past and conceive of the future, and how language and cognition interact in early childhood. Investigating these issues requires methods to access the cognitive mechanisms of processing, especially in non-verbal infants, and toddlers with limited language. To date, the vast majority of studies on development focus on explicit, global, and off-line measures of processing (e.g., verbal responses, pointing). These measures are limited because children’s responses are often clouded by cognitive and inhibitory demands. Thus, a major challenge when working with infants and children is to ensure that a study’s methodology is not so cognitively demanding that participants’ underlying knowledge is masked by their inability to complete the task. Because eye gaze is largely below the level of conscious control, eye tracking provides such a methodology. We are requesting eye tracking equipment for conducting research using on-line and implicit measurements of language and cognitive processing in infants and children. This equipment will lead to cutting-edge research that cannot be addressed via traditional, overt behavioural measures, including a project between Fennell and Zamuner that addresses language processing and speech decoding in bilingual infants and children. The requested eye trackers will be used in a brand-new, cutting-edge uOttawa Living Lab at the Canada Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) and will allow us to address this and other important areas of research in a quick and labour-light manner. The partnership between uOttawa’s Living Lab and CSTM is only the second of its kind in Canada and the first in Ontario. At the uOttawa Living Lab visitors are invited to participate with their children on studies about language and cognitive development and to actively contribute to the process of science and discovery. The combination of a Living Lab and unique eyetracking technology will be a first-of-its-kind project in Canada and will allow us to dramatically increase our research output and its impact on the scientific community. The results of our research will also have important benefits for Canada as a whole as it speaks to the impact of bilingualism on early language development.