Online Lexical Processing in a Diverse Group of Preschool Children

Recent research using the looking while listening paradigm has shown that 18-montholds with larger vocabularies look more rapidly to pictures of familiar objects than their peers with smaller vocabularies. The purpose of this study was to extend this work to older children (30 to 60 months) and to include children from both middleand low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Because the children were older, we used a four alternative forced choice (4AFC) rather than a 2AFC paradigm. Children were presented with four pictures of familiar objects (the target as well as semantic, phonological, and unrelated foils) in a 2 x 2 array and their eye movements were tracked as they heard phrases such as find the duck. Results indicated that the 4AFC paradigm was sensitive to differences in expressive vocabulary size; children with larger vocabularies from middle-SES families looked more to the target than peers with smaller vocabularies. When eye gaze patterns for looking to target of children from lowand mid-SES families were compared, there was an effect of expressive vocabulary size, but no independent effect of SES and no SES by expressive vocabulary size interaction. It is hypothesized that the lack of effect of SES is due to one or more of the limitations of this study.