Now You See Me, Now You Don't: Children Learn Grammar During Online Socially Contingent Video and Audio Interaction, 2020-2021

This study was run additionally to those originally proposed and in response to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. Since we could not conduct in-person testing, we trialled online testing via video conference calls and explored the extent to which learning via linguistic experiences occurs during remote conversations. We investigated whether children implicitly learn language during online interactions as they do during in-person interactions, and whether this is affected by the visual co-presence of a partner. During an online conference call, three- and five-year-olds alternated describing pictures with an experimenter who produced active and passive prime descriptions; half the participants had video+audio calls, and half had audio-only. Both age groups produced more passives after passive than active primes, both immediately and with accumulating input across trials; neither effect was influenced by call format. These results demonstrate that implicit grammar learning mechanisms operate during online interactions, and highlight the potential of online methodologies for developmental language production research.