Lilah, Anika and I took a trip to the Language & Learning Lab near U of T - Lilah so she could take part in a study and Anika so she could see their geckos and meet the staff (possibly so she can take part in tests later).
The test itself was pretty simple in structure - there were too experimenters, a reader and a tester. The tester sat in a corner and pretended to work while the reader read to Lilah a short story from a picture book - very slowly and deliberately, and twice through. The books were about some unusual animals and how they ate and what they did, and were accompanied by the typical sorts of anthropomorphized drawings you see in kids' books.
The reader left the room, and the tester sat across from Lilah, showed her a photograph of the real animal from the story, said she wanted to learn about the animal, and asked Lilah some yes/no questions which required indirect inferences drawn from the story (ie. if the story talked about an animal living on the back of a hippo, the question might be "Does [animal] care about hippos?").
Anika & Lilah were given some small toys, they took the girls picture, they explained the study to me, I asked some dumb questions, and we left.
The study itself is trying to tease out how kids learn about the real world from picture books. It seems intuitively obvious that kids learn the lessons we want them to learn about real things from picture books, but I can also see how that's a pretty huge assumption, and there's a lot to unpick there.
It was an interesting morning, the staff at the Lab were really nice and friendly, and science FTW!
