WFR

pronounced "woofer"

Data and analysis: "Woofer" github repo

Participant data, stimuli, videos: /Fas-Phyc-PEB-Lab/experimental_projects/WFR

Does infants' improvement in wordform recognition drive the word comprehension boost?

WFR is part of the R01 study looking at what factors drive the word boost. Specifically, this asks whether babies have the word boost before or after they have a strong set of words that they recognize the phonological form of (e.g. they can recognize a set of sounds that make up a familiar word in their language, even if they don't know its meaning yet).

We ask this in two steps:

1. An HPP study in the booth, where infants hear trials that each consist of a list of words of one type: real, familiar English words ( e.g. "Bottle, shoe, diaper, blanket, grandma") or phonetically possible fake words/very rare to babies words (e.g. "Koddy, dimma, doog, shammy, dapper"). We measure how long infants will turn their heads and attend to words in each trial type. If their attention is statistically different overall, that tells us they are successfully recognizing familiar English wordforms and treating them differently from psuedowords, which are sequences of phonemes they wouldn't have heard in that order regularly.

2. An eyetracking study, the CLF word recognition study. This is our indicator of the word boost. There is no manipulation in this study. We simply see if infants look more to the target object when it is labeled than the distractor.

Surveys: Demographics, WebCDI, WFR word exposure