The Coloring Book Project

The Coloring Book is a digital application developed especially for linguistic research on language comprehension. Participants hear a sentence and are being asked to color a specific part of the coloring page. Their actions implicitly reveal their linguistic competence. On a tablet or desktop, the child sees a blank coloring page. They receive an auditive description of the scene, such as “the green monkey is being scratched by the red monkey”. The child then selects the desired colors on the screen, and colors the page accordingly. If they do not understand the syntactic construction, they will color the page as if “the green monkey is scratching the red monkey”. This gives a very reliable impression of the child’s linguistic knowledge. This method can be used to test several different aspects of children’s knowledge of language. Not only can various syntactic structures be tested, but it can also be used for assessing lexicon during primary education.