Tapping into the potential of remote developmental research: introducing the OxfordBabylab app
The widespread use of mobile touchscreen devices in the home provides the opportunity to conduct remote experimental research with toddlers. We present a study aiming to investigate the feasibility and efficacy of using a mobile app for running alternative forced choice tasks with toddlers in the home. The parents of 153 toddlers aged between 12 and 36 months first completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) as a measure of their child’s vocabulary, and then completed a receptive vocabulary task with their child on their own mobile device. We evaluated the feasibility in terms of completion and engagement scores and the efficacy in terms of response systematicity. Our results show that it is both feasible and effective to use parents' own mobile devices to run a study with toddlers in their home. Toddlers were successfully engaged and their responses reflected their integration of the audio-visual context presented. We also introduce our OxfordBabylab app, a cross-platform mobile app which implements a customisable template for alternative forced choice tasks.