The current research examined how infants exploit linguistic information to update an agent’s false belief about an object’s location. Fourteen- to eighteen-month-old infants first watched a series of events involving two agents, a ball, and two containers (a box and a cup). Agent1 repeatedly acted on the ball and then put it in the box in the presence of agent2. Then agent1 disappeared from the scene and agent2 switched the ball’s location from the box to the cup. Upon agent1’s return, agent2 told her, “The ball is in the cup!” Agent1 then reached for either the cup (cup event) or the box (box event). The infants looked reliably longer if shown the box event as opposed to the cup event. However, when agent2 simply said, “The ball and the cup!” – which does not explicitly mention the ball’s new location – infants looked significantly longer if shown the cup event as opposed the box event. These findings thus provide new evidence for false-belief understanding in infancy and suggest that infants expect an agent’s false belief to be updated only by explicit verbal information.
Speech disfluencies (e.g., “Point to thee um turtle”) can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.
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