How Your Baby Scientist Contributes to Linguistic Research 

The Switch Task

So your infant has finally reached the big first birthday milestone and you’re ready to get them involved in Linguistics research at the University of Alberta! You connect with the Little Magpies Lab and schedule your appointment for one of the studies that is currently being conducted within the lab. Success! Not many children can say they were a baby scientist at the prime age of 13 months old! But this is Linguistics research, the scientific study of language and its structure. And your kiddo only speaks a handful of words. How can they contribute to a study focusing on language when their vocabulary is so small? 

Enter the Switch Task.

The Switch Task has the ability to test an infant’s understanding of language through a set of multiple trials and “tests”. But how can we determine an infant’s understanding of a word? Especially a word they may have never heard before? We can’t just ask them to use it in a sentence like at a Spelling Bee, now can we? Fear not - researchers can actually determine their understanding by measuring their attention span, usually through eye gaze. The meat and potatoes of the Switch Task are the Habituation Phase and the Test Phase. During the Habituation phase, an infant is introduced to two separate word-object pairs on a screen repeatedly until they eventually get bored of it. Their boredom is demonstrated by shorter looking times the more the word-object pair repeats. 

The Test Phase consists of two parts: the Switch Trial and the Same Trial. The Same Trial maintains the original word-object pairings found in the Habituation Phase. The Switch Trial uses the same two words and objects, but they switch the pairings so they are different from the Habituation Phase. By comparing your infant’s looking times between the Switch Trial and the Same Trial, researchers can determine your baby scientist’s ability to form links between a given word and object pairing. 

Hayley Ehrstien

July 2023 

Linguistics Students at the University of Alberta