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 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.