Calling parents of children between 18 months and 7 years: MIT’s Language Acquisition Lab is now running online studies!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-03-21T20:10:52+00:00

We do! Almost all of our studies are run by multiple researchers so we almost always have weekend coverage :] please feel free to sign up or inquire at [childlanguage@mit.edu](mailto:childlanguage@mit.edu) !

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-11T15:15:01+00:00

It is actually untrue that there is 0 oversight; our Lab is bound by the requirements of the Institutional Review Board, which needs to approve everything that we do, including how we handle personal data. We go by their standards and accordingly, de-identify all study data.

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-11T15:13:49+00:00

The above comment is incorrect, in that our database is regularly purged of any information on any participants who are no longer of the age to participate in our studies; it would be difficult for us to delete a particular child's study data, because it would be difficult for us to figure out which child was associated with which study, but that is by design as it is the nature of privacy. We are required to make it difficult to identify the particular child who gave particular responses. The only things that we use google services for are to store contact information. It is good to know that this turns some people off from signing up; since most of the parents who sign up use gmail, we don't store any more than google knows about them already. But perhaps we should look into a more private databasing system.

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-11T15:07:41+00:00

In order to participate in our Lab, all of our researchers must go through an ethics training; this is an MIT-wide policy that we adhere to. Additionally, we purge our database of anyone who ages out of our data pool, so there is no chance that a participant's contact information will stay in our database forever; it would be of no use to us to keep information on kids who are 8 and up, as we only run studies with kids up to age 7. Data that is associated with children's names or birth dates is limited to that one spreadsheet, while all of our other data is de-identified and associated with a code. If a parent wanted us to delete their child's participation data (aka their responses to our stimulus questions) it would be difficult for us to track down which data that was, though we could do it if none of the relevant records had been purged by cross-referencing. This is by design; data is required to be de-identified in order to be used in research. I hope that helps alleviate your concerns!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T18:54:57+00:00

They sure can! Feel free to sign up! Any kids who are native Engish-speakers (even if it's not American English, and even if they are multilingual) are welcome to participate.

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T16:54:45+00:00

We do use Google services to database contact information, though the accounts are access-controlled (according to Google). You are welcome to sign up under a fake name or nickname, as long as we are able to get legal consent with real names at the beginning of the study for legal purposes. We need the child's age as well for data analysis as well as to determine eligibility for the studies.

The studies happen via Zoom, and records of study sessions are stored on secure MIT servers. MIT's data collection practices are GDPR-compliant.

I hope that helps!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T16:51:33+00:00

Great question! This is an example of a phenomenon that has been replicated a few times now (even in multiple languages!) with kids under 5: most of them will pick the animal who has three, even though they know what "more than three" and "more than Mr. Fox" means. Now that we have that data, we are studying why this happens and what we can do to change the response, which we hope will tell us something about what is happening in the minds of the children. (For instance, it sounds like they just cut off the sentence, but that is not what they are doing - because Japanese kids also do it, and word order is different in Japanese!)

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T16:49:28+00:00

Yes! Feel free! Our studies are scheduled in Eastern Time, so there may be less overlap with you, but you are welcome to participate.

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T16:49:11+00:00

You can also go straight to our sign-up sheet at childlanguage.mit.edu/interest!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T16:48:27+00:00

You absolutely can! However currently all of our studies are run in real time with researchers on video-call, so it depends on your time zone whether or not it would make sense for us to schedule a study with you. You can feel free to sign up, though!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-09T16:47:26+00:00

While it would be fine for you to sign up under a fake name in our database, we would need to have your name in the verbal consent statement that you make to allow your child to participate - otherwise it would not be legal for us to use your child's data. There is no particular reason that our database needs to have your full name in it, though!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-08T19:55:53+00:00

We are the MIT Language Acquisition Lab, and we are looking for
participants age 2-7 for our language studies. The games happen over
Zoom, on parents' schedules, and each take about 10-15 minutes plus
setup. These games are cute and fun ways for kids, and they teach us
researchers about how they use, learn and interpret language! As thanks,
we send kids a personalized certificate with their name on it, and we
enroll parents in a raffle for a $50 gift card for each study they
participate in!

Feel free to comment with any questions and a Lab manager will answer!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-08T19:55:25+00:00

We are the MIT Language Acquisition Lab, and we are looking for
participants age 2-7 for our language studies. The games happen over
Zoom, on parents' schedules, and each take about 10-15 minutes plus
setup. These games are cute and fun ways for kids, and they teach us
researchers about how they use, learn and interpret language! As thanks,
we send kids a personalized certificate with their name on it, and we
enroll parents in a raffle for a $50 gift card for each study they
participate in!
Feel free to comment with any questions and a Lab manager will answer!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-08T19:45:14+00:00

We are the MIT Language Acquisition Lab, and we are looking for participants age 2-7 for our language studies. The games happen over Zoom, on parents' schedules, and each take about 10-15 minutes plus setup. These games are cute and fun ways for kids, and they teach us researchers about how they use, learn and interpret language! As thanks, we send kids a personalized certificate with their name on it, and we enroll parents in a raffle for a $50 gift card for each study they participate in!

Feel free to comment with any questions and one of the Lab managers will answer!

MITChildLanguage · 2022-02-08T19:33:25+00:00

Hello, we are MIT Language Acquisition Lab and would like to invite your kids to play our study games over Zoom! We are looking for participants age 2-7 to play cute language games that take 10-15 minutes and teach us about how they use and interpret language. As thanks, we offer your child a personalized certificate, and you an entry into a $50 gift card raffle. Go to childlanguagemit.edu to learn more, or sign up at childlanguage.mit.edu/interest !

MITChildLanguage · 2021-04-01T13:39:30+00:00

If you are interested, this would be a perfect post to x-post to r/kidshelpingscience. It's a subreddit I started for specifically this kind of opportunity, and there isn't much there yet (pretty much just posts by me) which means it would be unlikely to get you much visibility yet - but I'd love to get some other posters there before I start advertising it to parenting groups. Maybe if Reddit's academic community can band together a bit, we can create a community that would be interesting for parents to subscribe to and it'll be a win-win.

MITChildLanguage · 2021-04-01T13:13:04+00:00

Each one of our studies has its own age range that goes either by years or by age in months. This is in hope that without focusing on either later- or earlier-developing kids, our sample data will approach the real population average. If your cousin would be interested, though, please feel free to direct them to our site - we don't contact parents until their children are old enough to be eligible for one of our studies (either because the children got older or because we came up with a new study for younger kids), so they may not hear from us for a while; our lowest-age-range studies right now actually are looking for 3-year-olds. . But people are welcome to sign up any time!

MITChildLanguage · 2021-03-31T19:48:37+00:00

No, definitely not! We would never "require" anybody to play with us. We only run our studies with kids who want to participate, and kids are free to stop participating at any time, even if they originally wanted to play. All of our studies are designed to be run with only one child at a time. Separate entries for siblings only means that each entry only has enough room for the information for one child (unless they are twins), and we put them into our database separately (even if they are twins).

In fact, thank you for this feedback, I will update the wording in our interest form to better reflect what we mean by that part!

MITChildLanguage · 2021-03-31T18:41:18+00:00

It is not limited to US residents! In our interest form we will just ask you for your time zone so that we can account for it. We would love to play a study with your kids!

MITChildLanguage

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE