What Box: a task for assessing language lateralisation in young children

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1 Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
3 School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
4 Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen University Hospital, Aaschen, Germany
5 ESRC Deafness, Cognition, and Language Research Centre, University College London, University of London, London, United Kingdom
6 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, University of London, London, United Kingdom
7 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
8 Brain and Cognition Laboratory, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1939v2
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Psychology
Keywords
lateralisation, infants, language, children, adults, preschoolers, development, Doppler, functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound, toddlers
Copyright
© 2016 Badcock et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Badcock NA, Spooner R, Hofmann J, Flitton AJ, Elliott S, Kurylowicz L, Lavrencic LM, Payne HM, Holt GK, Holden A, Churches OF, Kohler MJ, Keage HA. 2016. What Box: a task for assessing language lateralisation in young children. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1939v2

Abstract

The assessment of active language lateralisation in infants and toddlers is challenging. It requires an imaging tool that is unintimidating, quick to setup, and robust to movement, in addition to an engaging and cognitively simple procedure that elicits language processing. Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound (fTCD) offers a suitable technique and here we report on a suitable method to elicit active language production in young children. The 34-second ‘What Box’ trial presents an animated face ‘searching’ for an object. The face ‘finds’ a box that opens to reveal an object, which may be labelled spontaneously, in response to a “What’s this?” prompt, or in response to the object label. What Box conducted with 95 children (1 to 5 years-of-age, completing a median of 7 trials), who were left-lateralised on average. The task was validated (ρ = 0.4) against the gold standard Word Generation task in a group of older adults (n = 65, 60 to 85 years-of-age, median of 24 trials). Existing methods for assessing lateralisation of active language production have been used with 4-year-old children while passive listening has been conducted with sleeping 6-month-olds. This is the first active method to be successfully employed with infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers, and show good correspondence to Word Generation in older adults.

Author Comment

This version of the manuscript includes corrected author affiliations for Nicholas Badcock, Lisa Kurylowicz, and Louise Lavrencic. All authors had missing affiliations on the website and Lisa's was missing within the manuscript itself.