What is the Preferential Looking Paradigm? The Preferential Looking Paradigm (PLP) One of the most successful methods for assessing word-learning skills in this age range is the Preferential Looking Paradigm (PLP) developed by Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and colleagues (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996). The theoretical basis for the PLP is grounded on finding from the behavioral sciences that when an association is formed between two perceptual cues, the presence of one will trigger increased attention to the other (Allport, 1989, James, 1890). The PLP was inspired by findings that 1-year-olds will consistently fixate on an object longer when they hear that object's name than when they hear a nonsense word (Thomas, Campos, Shucard, Ramsey, & Shucard, 1981). In the simplest version of the PLP, infants are presented with two pairings of a novel word and a novel object, one-at-a-time, during a training phase. During a test phase, both objects are presented but only one of the words is presented. The infants are videotaped and the length of time they look at each object is coded. If children look longer at the named object it is assumed that they have learned the word. The PLP methodology has been successful in exploring infants' ability to make simple associations between words and objects and words and actions (e.g., Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996). Various elaborations of the PLP have enabled investigators to explore infants' ability to learn nouns and verbs as well as prepositions (McDonough, Choi, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1998) and simple syntactic structures (e.g., Naigles, 1998). Moreover, by manipulating similarities between the visual displays presented during the training and test phases, researchers have been able to investigate infants' ability to generalize words to new exemplars (Hennon et al., 1999). The PLP has been used successfully with normal-hearing infants as young as 6 months (Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999) to children as old as 3 years (Naigles, 1998). To the best of our knowledge, this methodology has not been used yet with deaf or hard-of-hearing infants or very young children. Return to What to Expect When You Visit. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU VISIT | SCHEDULE & DIRECTIONS | LINKS TO LITERATURE | OUR PHOTO ALBUM | PEOPLE | PRESS | PUBLICATIONS | AFFILIATES | CONTACT US | HOME |