Participate in our research for 4-5 year olds!

Welcome to the language and memory animal games! In these online games, you and your child will play a guessing game on Zoom, and interact with different types of animals in two online games.

Why we are running this study

How do memory and language interact throughout development? This study will help us compare different general cognitive processes and their role in children’s language acquisition.

What happens during this study

The first part of this study will be a live session on Zoom with a researcher, and will take about 30 minutes to complete. In the live session, a puppet will describe some pictures, and we are interested in your child’s interpretations of what the puppet says.
We are also interested in your interpretations! While your child plays with the puppet, we will ask you to fill out a language survey.
Next, your child will play two interactive games, with a break in between games. This second part of this study will also take about 30 minutes.

Participation is voluntary

You and your child are free to choose whether to be in this study. If you do choose to participate, it’s okay to stop at any point during the sessions. Please do pause or stop the session if your child becomes fussy or does not want to participate!

What are the risks?

There are no expected risks if you participate in the study.

What are the benefits?

After you finish both parts of the study, we send an Amazon gift card code for $10 to thank you for helping us find out about children’s language.
You will receive your gift card via email within one week of participation, and we will send a gift card even if we are not able to use your child’s data!
There are no other direct benefits to you or your child from participating, but we hope you will enjoy the experience.

Data collection and webcam recording

During the session, you and your child will be recorded by your computer’s webcam and microphone.

Data are stored securely on Sharepoint servers, and are only shared as described on this page. However, there is always a small risk that data transmitted over the internet may be intercepted or that the security of stored data may be compromised.

Who will be able to see your webcam recordings?

At the end of the session in Part 1, you will choose a privacy level for your recordings. You can choose one of the following privacy levels for your videos:

• “Private”: Researchers with access to your recordings will not share them with anyone else.
• “Scientific”: Researchers with access to your recordings may share them for scientific or educational purposes, for instance showing an example in a class or during a scientific conference.
• “Publicity”: Researchers with access to your recordings may also share them for publicity, for instance in a news segment about the research or to recruit more participants.

You will also have the option to withdraw your recordings. If you do, only your consent recording will be kept and all other recordings will be deleted.

How we use your data

If you participate in this study, we (the research group led by Juliana Gerard at Ulster University and Dana McDaniel at the University of Southern Maine) will have access to

• webcam recordings and other data collected during this session
• your account profile and demographic survey
• the child profile for the child who is participating

This includes changes you make in the future to any of this information. We may put different types of information together to learn more about child development. For instance, if your child participates in multiple studies from our group, we may look at how his or her responses compare across studies, or we may look at whether siblings tend to respond similarly. We may also study connections between children’s responses and family demographic survey data.

We are primarily interested in your child’s responses in the interactive games, and their interpretations of the sentences in the live session.

Your rights as a participant

You are not waiving any legal claims, rights or remedies because of your participation in this research study. If you feel you have been treated unfairly, or you have questions regarding your rights as a research subject, you may contact the Ulster University Risk and Ethics Committee and Nick Curry, Head of Research Governance at n.curry@ulster.ac.uk or +44 28 9536 5123.

How to reach us

This study is run by Juliana Gerard at Ulster University and Dana McDaniel and the University of Southern Maine. If you or your child have any questions or concerns about this study, or in the very unlikely event of a research-related injury, please contact Juliana Gerard at j.gerard@ulster.ac.uk or (415) 336-1791.

If you consent to participate, click “Next” to choose a time for the Zoom session.

After you choose a time, you will receive the link to the online games in Part 2.