Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm

The Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm is a method for assessing language comprehension in infants and young children. It was first used in a 1987 paper by psychologists Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, Kathleen M. Cauley, and Laura Gordon.
The paradigm involves placing a child on their mother's lap in front of two video monitors, which play two different events simultaneously. A speaker between the two monitors plays a verbal sentence that matches only one of the videos. A hidden observer measures how much the child looks at each screen. If the child watches the correct monitor longer and more quickly than the incorrect monitor, they are deemed to have understood the sentence.
In the initial 1987 study, puppets of Big Bird and Cookie Monster were used for an experiment to determine whether two-year-old children could understand how the meaning of a sentence changes when the words are in a different order. For example, children would hear an audio recording saying "Find Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird," while one monitor played a scene of Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird and the other played a scene of Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster. The experiment was also performed with Cookie Monster feeding Big Bird and vice versa.
The study found that the children did indeed have comprehension of word order. This was the first reliable test of word order comprehension in young children, and showed that language comprehension developed before language production.
The Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm went on to be used in many other studies. The researchers, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, would later become consultants for Sesame Workshop.
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Category:Scientific Mentions
Category:Psychology