Kid Studies

When a child calls a rabbit a "wabbit", do they really think that's how "rabbit" sounds, or do they know better but have difficulty producing it? Our Kid Talk line of studies compares preschoolers' speech perception to their own speech production. From the sounds we tested, we found that young children's perception of their own speech was less accurate than perception of adult's speech by about 13% suggesting that they perceive better than they produce. However, they appear less sure of their own accurate productions when those productions could be a different sound. We're now looking at how children perceive other children's speech.

The world contains a wide variety of voices, and voices can provide clues about many of the speaker’s attributes. Here we ask, when 3 to 5 year old children hear adult voices, do they make similar inferences about speaker gender as adults, or are they less certain about a speaker’s gender identity based on voice? So far, we have found that children are less certain than adult listeners when guessing a speaker’s gender, which is in line with previous studies finding that children don’t have fully established ideas of gender until they are around six or seven.

Preschoolers say the darnest things!

Do you like dogs?
"Only when they are far away I do!"

What do snowmen like?

"Snowmans don't like the sun!"

Can you sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"?
"No I need an instrument."

While looking at a picture of an ear during the computer game:
"That's my daddy"

How old are you?
"I used to be four, but now I'm five...Life goes by so fast!"