Body-Specificity: Do Children with Overweight Respond More Slowly to Action Verbs?

This paper hypothesises that weight as a physical characteristic may influence children's perception of and response to different stimuli. One of the experimental hypotheses is that compared to overweight children, children with a healthy weight are expected to respond faster to both motion-related and non-motion-related verbs. In addition, overweight children would be expected to respond slower to motion-related verbs than non-motion-related verbs, whereas healthy-weight children would not show a significant difference in their responses to the two verb types. In terms of prediction, the Bayesian linear mixed-effects model predicted that healthy-weight children would respond faster overall than overweight children to both verb types. The study involves 48 children aged 8-13, divided into two groups based on BMI: 24 overweight and 24 healthy-weight children. Participants are screened for major health issues, and parents complete a child behavior questionnaire to control for psychological symptoms. Using a lexical decision task on a computer, children identify whether displayed items are words or non-words, pressing keys to respond. The target words include neutral and sports-related terms to measure response speed differences between groups, analyzed using Bayesian linear mixed-effect models.