Disfluencies signal reference to novel objects for adults but not children

Owens, Sarah J.; Thacker, Justine Marie; Graham, Susan A.

doi:10.1017/s0305000917000368

Cited by 8 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…Our study provides an important contribution to the literature on children's predictive use of disfluencies, which had previously been limited to studies of monolingual English-learning children (Kidd et al, 2011;Orena & White, 2015;Owens & Graham, 2016;Owens et al, 2018;Thacker, Chambers, & Graham, 2018). We replicated these findings with English monolinguals, and extended them to French monolinguals and French-English bilinguals.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Uh and euh signal novelty for monolinguals and bilinguals: evidence from children and adults

Morin-Lessard¹,

Byers‐Heinlein²

2019

J. Child Lang.

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Previous research suggests that English monolingual children and adults can use speech disfluencies (e.g., uh) to predict that a speaker will name a novel object. To understand the origins of this ability, we tested 48 32-month-old children (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingual English–French; Study 1) and 16 adults (bilingual English–French; Study 2). Our design leveraged the distinct realizations of English (uh) versus French (euh) disfluencies. In a preferential-looking paradigm, participants saw familiar–novel object pairs (e.g., doll–rel), labeled in either Fluent (“Look at the doll/rel!”), Disfluent Language-consistent (“Look at thee uh doll/rel!”), or Disfluent Language-inconsistent (“Look at thee euh doll/rel!”) sentences. All participants looked more at the novel object when hearing disfluencies, irrespective of their phonetic realization. These results suggest that listeners from different language backgrounds harness disfluencies to comprehend day-to-day speech, possibly by attending to their lengthening as a signal of speaker uncertainty. Stimuli and data are available at <https://osf.io/qn6px/>.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

“…The sequence of each trial followed Kidd et al (2011), such that novel labels were also discourse-new (see Graham, 2016, andOwens et al, 2018, for evidence that discourse novelty is a driver of disfluency effects in children). There were three presentations of each object label.…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Uh and euh signal novelty for monolinguals and bilinguals: evidence from children and adults

Morin-Lessard¹,

Byers‐Heinlein²

2019

J. Child Lang.

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“…As the discourse-new object was also always the novel object in the Kidd et al (2011) paradigm, a recent series of studies sought to disentangle these factors. These findings demonstrated that 2- and 3-year-old children readily associate filled pauses with upcoming reference to discourse-new ( Owens and Graham, 2016 ) objects but not unfamiliar objects ( Owens et al, 2017 ). This contrasts with studies showing that adults show referential anticipation of novel objects upon hearing a filled pause ( Arnold et al, 2007 ; Owens et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…These findings demonstrated that 2- and 3-year-old children readily associate filled pauses with upcoming reference to discourse-new ( Owens and Graham, 2016 ) objects but not unfamiliar objects ( Owens et al, 2017 ). This contrasts with studies showing that adults show referential anticipation of novel objects upon hearing a filled pause ( Arnold et al, 2007 ; Owens et al, 2017 ). Recently, research has highlighted preschoolers’ ability to amend an initial prediction (e.g., that talkers are more likely to refer to a preferred familiar object) when encountering a disfluency ( Thacker et al, 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Five-Year-Olds’ and Adults’ Use of Paralinguistic Cues to Overcome Referential Uncertainty

2018

Self Cite

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An eye-tracking methodology was used to explore adults’ and children’s use of two utterance-based cues to overcome referential uncertainty in real time. Participants were first introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then produced fluent (“Look! Look at the blicket.”) or disfluent (“Look! Look at thee, uh, blicket.”) instructions referring to novel objects in a display containing both talker-preferred and talker-dispreferred colored items. Adults (Expt 1, n = 24) directed a greater proportion of looks to talker-preferred objects during the initial portion of the utterance (“Look! Look at…”), reflecting the use of indexical cues for talker identity. However, they immediately reduced consideration of an object bearing the talker’s preferred color when the talker was disfluent, suggesting they infer disfluency would be more likely as a talker describes dispreferred objects. Like adults, 5-year-olds (Expt 2, n = 27) directed more attention to talker-preferred objects during the initial portion of the utterance. Children’s initial predictions, however, were not modulated when disfluency was encountered. Together, these results demonstrate that adults, but not 5-year-olds, can act on information from two talker-produced cues within an utterance, talker preference, and speech disfluencies, to establish reference.

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“…Recordings of participants' eye movements showed that listeners already anticipated reference to unknown objects (increase in proportion of fixations to unknown objects) when hearing the filler uh in the disfluent condition (i.e., well before hearing the target). Other studies have since shown the same effect in children as young as 2 years of age (Kidd, White, & Aslin, 2011;Orena & White, 2015;Owens & Graham, 2016;Owens, Thacker, & Graham, 2018;Thacker, Chambers, & Graham, 2018a, 2018b. Adult listeners have also been shown to be able to predict other types of complex referents, such as discourse-new (Arnold, Fagnano, & Tanenhaus, 2003;Arnold, Tanenhaus, Altmann, & Fagnano, 2004;Barr & Seyfeddinipur, 2010), compound (Watanabe, Hirose, Den, & Minematsu, 2008), and low-frequency referents (Bosker, Quené, Sanders, & De Jong, 2014a) upon hearing a disfluent filler uh.…”

mentioning

confidence: 86%

Counting ‘uhm’s: How tracking the distribution of native and non-native disfluencies influences online language comprehension

Bosker

Does

et al. 2019

Journal of Memory and Language

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A B S T R A C TDisfluencies, like uh, have been shown to help listeners anticipate reference to low-frequency words. The associative account of this 'disfluency bias' proposes that listeners learn to associate disfluency with low-frequency referents based on prior exposure to non-arbitrary disfluency distributions (i.e., greater probability of low-frequency words after disfluencies). However, there is limited evidence for listeners actually tracking disfluency distributions online. The present experiments are the first to show that adult listeners, exposed to a typical or more atypical disfluency distribution (i.e., hearing a talker unexpectedly say uh before high-frequency words), flexibly adjust their predictive strategies to the disfluency distribution at hand (e.g., learn to predict high-frequency referents after disfluency). However, when listeners were presented with the same atypical disfluency distribution but produced by a non-native speaker, no adjustment was observed. This suggests pragmatic inferences can modulate distributional learning, revealing the flexibility of, and constraints on, distributional learning in incremental language comprehension.

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Disfluencies signal reference to novel objects for adults but not children

Cited by 8 publications

References 40 publications

Uh and euh signal novelty for monolinguals and bilinguals: evidence from children and adults

Uh and euh signal novelty for monolinguals and bilinguals: evidence from children and adults

Five-Year-Olds’ and Adults’ Use of Paralinguistic Cues to Overcome Referential Uncertainty

Counting ‘uhm’s: How tracking the distribution of native and non-native disfluencies influences online language comprehension

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