Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

Abstract

Adults design utterances to match listeners' informational needs by making both “generic” adjustments (e.g., mentioning atypical more often than typical information) and “particular” adjustments tailored to their specific interlocutor (e.g., including things that their addressee cannot see). For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. Three experiments investigated how generic and particular factors affect children's production. In Experiment 1, 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children and adults described typical and atypical instrument events to a silent listener who could either see or not see the events. In later extensions, participants described the same events to either a silent (Experiment 2) or an interactive (Experiment 3) addressee with a specific goal. Both adults and 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds performed generic adjustments but, unlike adults, children made listener‐particular adjustments inconsistently. These and prior findings can be explained by assuming that particular adjustments can be costlier for children to implement compared to generic adjustments.

Representing agents, patients, goals and instruments in causative events: A cross‐linguistic investigation of early language and cognition

“…This result is consistent with the hypothesis that thematic roles in language build on antecedently available abstract event roles in cognition (Jackendoff, 1990, among others). Furthermore, it integrates and extends prior data on the contribution of Patients (Cohen & Oakes, 1993;Golinkoff & Kerr, 1978;Hafri et al, 2013Hafri et al, , 2018 ; Leslie & Keeble, 1987), Goals (Lakusta et al, 2007;Lakusta & Landau, 2012) and Instruments (Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019a, 2019bRismann et al, 2015) to event representation in both language and cognition.…”

“…Second, current work on the perception of event roles relevant for language has typically focused on simple events, with Agents and Patients being two roles that have been studied most commonly (Griffin & Bock, 2000;Dobel et al, 2007;Hafri et al, 2013Hafri et al, , 2018. However, it is important to integrate various event roles, including, Goals (Lakusta et al, 2007;Lakusta & Landau, 2012) and Instruments (Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019a, 2019bRismann et al, 2015), and investigate their relative salience within a single more complex event. This is especially important because asymmetries between event components can be seen most clearly when individual components are studied together within an event (Lakusta et al, 2007;Lakusta & Landau, 2012;Papafragou, 2010;Do et al, 2020), and disagreements remain in the literature about the ranking of roles beyond Agents and Patients (Baker, 1997;Fillmore, 1968Fillmore, , 1971Grimshaw 1990;Jackendoff, 1972;Wolff, 2007).…”

“…Instrument asymmetry might not surface in linguistic encoding in Turkish. Consistent with this possibility, there have been reports of rampant omissions of Goals, Sources and Instruments in young Turkish learners’ descriptions of multi‐participant events (Furman et al., 2014; Göksun et al., 2008, Ketrez & Aksu‐Koç, 2009), even though the data cannot be directly compared to English learners’ omissions of these event components (see Bunger et al., 2012, on Goals; and Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019a, 2019b , on Instruments).…”

“…Recent developmental work with English speakers also shows that both 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds and adults tend to mention atypical instruments in event descriptions, especially when communicating with an interactive conversation partner (Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019a). Furthermore, children but not adults continue to omit the instrument even when their conversation partner cannot see the pictures being described (Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019b). Importantly, the perceived centrality of instruments to event structure depends on the nature of the event.…”

Speakers Align With Their Partner's Overspecification During Interaction

“…This may point to the role of interaction in highlighting an interlocutor's informational needs and communicative preferences, motivating speakers to tailor their production behavior in response (cf. Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019).…”