Study title

United Kingdom

Individual

A language learning task was administered to 3-4-year-old English-speaking children in their nursery or preschool. They engaged in a touch-screen game with an experimenter in which they learned novel verbs. Their understanding of verb meanings was tested in a two-alternative forced-choice test. Their answers on this verb generalization test were automatically saved to an Excel spreadsheet.The data for Experiment 3 were collected between the 28th of November 2018 and the 21st of January 2019. As in Experiments 1 and 2, the sample included 48 typically developing children (25 girls, 23 boys) between 36–50 months old (M = 43.24, SD = 4.54). An additional eight children were tested but excluded from the analysis because they pointed only to answers on the one side of the screen in test trials (N = 1), were not compliant (e.g., covered their face with their arm during the task, N = 1), did not finish all the trials (N = 1), were too old on the day of testing (N = 2), or did not meet the English language requirements (N = 3). Participants were recruited via two public nurseries and two Early Years Teaching Centers in Warwickshire (United Kingdom) and from a database of families interested in taking part in language development research with their child at the University of Warwick. The nurseries where the data for this experiment were collected partly overlapped with Experiments 1 and 2, but none of the children had participated in these previous experiments. Twelve percent of the children had a racial background other than White (8% Asian, 4% Black). There were 13 girls and 11 boys in the iconic manner gesture group and 12 girls and 12 boys in the control group. Children’s age in months did not differ between the two groups, F(1, 46) = 1.19, p = .281, nor did their gender ꭓ2(1) = 0.08, p = .773. Informed parental consent was obtained for all participants. All children were exposed to the English language for at least 70% of the time and English was the primary language spoken at home (as indicated by their caregivers). Participating nurseries received a book voucher and children who took part in the research lab received a toy and a certificate. Each child was pseudo-randomly assigned to a condition, based on their age and gender, before the experimenter met them.