Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses.
One of the greatest challenges of developmental psychology is figuring out what children are thinking. This is particularly difficult in early childhood, for children who are prelinguistic or are just beginning to speak their first words. In this stage, children's responses are commonly measure...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2019-01-01
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| Series: | PLoS ONE |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217207 |
| _version_ | 1819114999849680896 |
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| author | Emily Sumner Erika DeAngelis Mara Hyatt Noah Goodman Celeste Kidd |
| author_facet | Emily Sumner Erika DeAngelis Mara Hyatt Noah Goodman Celeste Kidd |
| author_sort | Emily Sumner |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | One of the greatest challenges of developmental psychology is figuring out what children are thinking. This is particularly difficult in early childhood, for children who are prelinguistic or are just beginning to speak their first words. In this stage, children's responses are commonly measured by presenting young children with a limited choice between one of a small number of options (e.g., "Do you want X or Y?"). A tendency to choose one response in these tasks may be taken as an indication of a child's preference or understanding. Adults' responses are known to exhibit order biases when they are asked questions. The current set of experiments looks into the following question: do children demonstrate response biases? Together, we show that 1) toddlers demonstrate a robust verbal recency bias when asked "or" questions in a lab-based task and a naturalistic corpus of caretaker-child speech interactions, 2) the recency bias weakens with age, and 3) the recency bias strengthens as the syllable-length of the choices gets longer. Taken together, these results indicate that children show a different type of response bias than adults, recency instead of primacy. Further, the results may suggest that this bias stems from increased constraints on children's working memory. |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-22T04:54:13Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-c23a31d51f034ad1a5764dabcf4e8431 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1932-6203 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-22T04:54:13Z |
| publishDate | 2019-01-01 |
| publisher | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
| record_format | Article |
| series | PLoS ONE |
| spelling | doaj.art-c23a31d51f034ad1a5764dabcf4e84312022-12-21T18:38:25ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032019-01-01146e021720710.1371/journal.pone.0217207Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses.Emily SumnerErika DeAngelisMara HyattNoah GoodmanCeleste KiddOne of the greatest challenges of developmental psychology is figuring out what children are thinking. This is particularly difficult in early childhood, for children who are prelinguistic or are just beginning to speak their first words. In this stage, children's responses are commonly measured by presenting young children with a limited choice between one of a small number of options (e.g., "Do you want X or Y?"). A tendency to choose one response in these tasks may be taken as an indication of a child's preference or understanding. Adults' responses are known to exhibit order biases when they are asked questions. The current set of experiments looks into the following question: do children demonstrate response biases? Together, we show that 1) toddlers demonstrate a robust verbal recency bias when asked "or" questions in a lab-based task and a naturalistic corpus of caretaker-child speech interactions, 2) the recency bias weakens with age, and 3) the recency bias strengthens as the syllable-length of the choices gets longer. Taken together, these results indicate that children show a different type of response bias than adults, recency instead of primacy. Further, the results may suggest that this bias stems from increased constraints on children's working memory.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217207 |
| spellingShingle | Emily Sumner Erika DeAngelis Mara Hyatt Noah Goodman Celeste Kidd Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses. PLoS ONE |
| title | Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses. |
| title_full | Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses. |
| title_fullStr | Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses. |
| title_full_unstemmed | Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses. |
| title_short | Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children's verbal responses. |
| title_sort | cake or broccoli recency biases children s verbal responses |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217207 |
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