This study is looking at how children understand how certain verbs can be used in different sentence structures. The child first listens to a bunch of sentences with verbs that have both a subject and an object, like “A monkey! The mouse should hug him.” These verbs are special in English because you can’t use them in sentences without an object—you can’t say, “The mouse should hug,” without mentioning the person getting hugged. By playing these sentences over and over to start, we are reinforcing the expectation that these verbs should have an object after them.
Then, we make a change to the sentences. We measure how much kids are looking at the abstract video on the screen to determine how much they’re paying attention to the sentences. We then compare how much kids are paying attention to the sentences with objects and the sentences without objects. If there’s a difference, this tells us that they’re expecting objects after these verbs and they notice when the object goes missing, even in a question with the word who. We’re testing this between the ages of 15 and 18 months because previous results suggest that this understanding is developing over these ages.
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