Don’t worry, we didn’t try to find out if our girl is really a girl – we just helped a researcher at the BabyLab of the “Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique” (their website has changed, by the way) in her study of whether 31-months-old toddlers already distinguish between “le” and “la” in the French language.
If you are a faithful reader of this blog, you’ll remember my recent note on that question.

Since our first participation in one of their studies, the BabyLab has moved to the new building of the Port-Royal maternity ward which finally opened last year. My girl got to sit on my lab and watch a big screen in front of her. A machine that tracks eye movements did, well, track her eye movements. As for me, I was once again listening to cool music with headphones, so that my reactions wouldn’t influence hers. I saw that she was shown two pictures, then a rainbow-coloured star, then two other pictures and so on, for about five minutes. I couldn’t hear what the voice said, except when it happened to speak between songs. But the researcher told me afterwards that it would say “Where is the…?” and that the picture pairs were sometimes of the same gender (both male or both female) and sometimes of different genders. The idea was to see if the article in the question, without the name of the object, would be sufficient to direct the child to look at the object of the corresponding gender.
I know this will sound confusing to English native speakers, but if you speak at least one language that has genders, like German, French, Italian or Russian, you will know what I mean. Here is an example:

Screen showing a cow (la vache) and a ship (le bateau): “Tu vois la [vache]?”

Will she look to the cow? Or to the ship? Or to neither?

As for what my girl did, I have no idea. All I know is that she cooperated well, no fidgeting or anything, not even when the experiment was prolonged as the computer suddenly decided to shut down and they had to start all over again.

As a reward, she got a “honorary member of the LSCP” diploma. We’ll put it up on the wall with her first one from December 2010. 🙂