Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition

Martin Zettersten¹, Daniel Yurovsky², Tian Linger Xu³, Sarp Uner⁴, Angeline Sin Mei Tsui⁵, Rose M Schneider⁶, Annissa N Saleh⁷, Stephan C Meylan^{8

9}, Virginia A Marchman⁵, Jessica Mankewitz⁵, Kyle MacDonald¹⁰, Bria Long⁵, Molly Lewis², George Kachergis⁵, Kunal Handa¹¹, Benjamin deMayo¹², Alexandra Carstensen⁶, Mika Braginsky⁹, Veronica Boyce⁵, Naiti S Bhatt¹³, Claire Augusta Bergey¹⁴, Michael C Frank⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 218 Peretsman Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA. martincz@princeton.edu.
² Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
³ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
⁴ Data Science Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
⁵ Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
⁶ Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
⁷ Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
⁸ Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
⁹ Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
¹⁰ Core Technology, McD Tech Labs, Mountain View, CA, USA.
¹¹ Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
¹² Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 218 Peretsman Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA.
¹³ Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
¹⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

PMID: 36002623
PMCID: PMC9950292
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-022-01906-4

Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition

Martin Zettersten et al. Behav Res Methods. 2023 Aug.

. 2023 Aug;55(5):2485-2500.

doi: 10.3758/s13428-022-01906-4. Epub 2022 Aug 24.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 218 Peretsman Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA. martincz@princeton.edu.
² Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
³ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
⁴ Data Science Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
⁵ Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
⁶ Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
⁷ Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
⁸ Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
⁹ Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
¹⁰ Core Technology, McD Tech Labs, Mountain View, CA, USA.
¹¹ Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
¹² Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 218 Peretsman Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA.
¹³ Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
¹⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

PMID: 36002623
PMCID: PMC9950292
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-022-01906-4

Abstract

The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We first present how we created the database, its features and structure, and associated tools for processing and accessing infant eye-tracking datasets. Using these tools, we then work through two illustrative examples to show how researchers can use Peekbank to interrogate theoretical and methodological questions about children's developing word recognition ability.

Keywords: Eye-tracking; Lexical processing; Looking-while-listening; Visual world paradigm; Vocabulary development; Word recognition.

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Figures

**Fig. 1**
Overview of the Peekbank data ecosystem. Peekbank tools are highlighted in *green*. * indicates R packages introduced in this work

**Fig. 2**
The Peekbank schema. Each *darker rectangle* represents a table in the relational database. Arrows indicate linked records across tables. AOIs are areas of interest in an eye-tracking experiment, in this case information about the position of target and distractor stimuli on the screen

**Fig. 3**
Screenshot of the Peekbank Shiny app, which shows a variety of standard analysis plots as a function of user-selected datasets, words, age ranges, and analysis windows. Shown here are mean reaction time and proportion target looking over time by age group for two selected datasets

**Fig. 4**
Item-level variability in proportion target looking within each dataset (chance = 0.5). Time is centered on the onset of the target label (*vertical line*). *Colored lines* represent specific target labels. *Black lines* represent smoothed average fits based on a general additive model using cubic splines

**Fig. 5**
Proportion looking at the correct referent by time from the point of disambiguation (the onset of the target noun) based on data from Swingley and Aslin (2002) imported into the Peekbank database. *Colors* show the two pronunciation conditions; *points* give means and *ranges* show 95% confidence intervals. The *dotted line* shows the point of disambiguation and the *dashed line* shows chance performance

**Fig. 6**
Time course plot for four well-represented target items in the Peekbank dataset, split by three age groups. Each *line* represents children’s average looking to the target image after the onset of the target label (*dashed vertical line*). *Error bars* represent 95% CIs

See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition

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Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition

Authors

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