Supplemental Materials
“Children and Adults Integrate Talker and Verb Information in Online Processing”
By Arielle Borovsky & Sarah C. Creel, 2014, Developmental Psychology
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0035591
Pre-Experiment Stimulus Norming
Prior to the study, we conducted two norming experiments with 28 preschool children
(mean age 4 years, 4 months; range from 3 years 4 months to 5 years 1 month)—the youngest
age range to be tested—who did not participate in the final experiment. The goals of this
norming were twofold: (a) to ensure that preschool children were familiar with the object images
and labels for the sentence comprehension task and (b) to determine if preschool children had the
requisite knowledge to generate stable predictions about the items each role would act upon in
the sentences. To address the first goal, we asked preschool children to select a named image
when it appeared among other images in the quartet. The images that were selected for the study
were highly recognized by preschool children (> 95%). For the second goal, we asked
participants to select the item that each role was likely to act upon (e.g., “Which one does a
princess hold?”). Quartets were excluded from the eye-tracking task if any single image within a
quartet was not correctly selected by at least 64% of preschoolers. Average image selection in
selected quartets was 90.8%. Ten quartets were originally normed, but four did not meet criteria
for selection in the study, yielding six quartets for the final study.
Selecting and Recording the Talkers
Twelve native English speakers (six female and six male) served as the voices for each of
the 12 roles in the study. Their voices were recorded in a sound-attenuated booth and sampled at
44,100 Hz on a single channel. Each speaker initially recorded all gender-appropriate roles, and
the final role for each speaker was selected by aggregated ratings of nine members of the lab
community.
Sound Normalization
Sounds for the sentence comprehension phase were also normalized to standard duration
using the following procedure. First, the onsets of each section of the sentence (I want to),
Action (hold), Article (the), and Theme (sword)) were marked. Then, the length of each section
was normalized to the mean duration of all words in the same sentential position. Some actions
also included a preposition (e.g., ride in). This procedure resulted in 24 natural-sounding
sentences of equal length, with word onsets aligned for the action (onset at 1,068 ms), article
(1,754 ms), and theme (1,928 ms).