How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

Abstract

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, ‘I have a cough’, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. In addition, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3.5- to 4-year-old speakers of British English (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge through priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, reveal a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. There was no clear association between relevance inferencing and Theory of Mind. There was mixed evidence for the role of formal language, which should be further investigated. Finally, real-world knowledge was indeed associated with relevance inferencing but future experimental work is required to test causal relations.

Context-Sensitivity Influences German and Chinese Preschoolers’ Comprehension of Indirect Communication

“…This finding is in line with prior findings regarding the difficulty of indirect communicative acts, namely that children’s performance depends on the number of inferential steps that need to be taken to arrive at the speaker’s meaning or the number of contexts and alternative meanings that one can think of when hearing an utterance (de Villiers et al, 2009). It is also in line with a recent finding that growing world knowledge positively influences children’s relevance inferencing (Abbot-Smith et al, 2022) since the relation between the item mentioned in the utterance and the intended object that the child should choose can only be established through world knowledge. It is, however, important to note that the children nevertheless chose the correct object above chance in both groups of items.…”

“…Prior studies suggested that children’s increase in the comprehension of indirect communicative acts could be a consequence of growing world knowledge (Abbot-Smith et al, 2022) or a number of other socio-cognitive abilities (e.g., executive functions, Theory of Mind, or working memory as well as language skills, see Matthews et al, 2018 for a review). The present study adds a new factor to this list: an increase in the comprehension of indirect communicative acts could be due to an increase in context-sensitivity which itself seems to be subject to cultural socialization.…”

“…Each trial consisted of four phases in which video vignettes (phases a, b, and d) or a static picture of two alternative objects (phase c) were shown (see Figure 3). The German stimuli have been used in a number of previous studies (Schulze & Buttelmann, 2021a;Schulze et al, 2013Schulze et al, , 2020 and have also been implemented and adapted for the use in different cultural contexts (e.g., Abbot-Smith et al, 2022). These original stimuli were translated into Chinese and/or newly created to fit the Chinese cultural context based on suggestions from native speakers.…”

“…Understanding others’ communication is a daily endeavor, in which we need to infer a speaker’s intentions from what they said in order to know what the speaker wanted us to know or do (Grice, 1989; Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Tomasello, 2008). To infer a speaker’s intentions we take several information into account, for instance, ostensive cues such as gaze, prosody, and reference (Csibra, 2010), world knowledge (Abbot-Smith et al, 2022), or common ground (Clark, 1996; Tomasello, 2008). Thus, we try to establish why a given utterance is relevant by paying attention to the context (Bruner, 1983; Grice, 1989; Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Tomasello, 2008).…”

“… 2. Please note that in the indirect communication condition, some stimuli might be easier to solve than others because of the number of inferential steps that need to be taken to arrive at the speaker’s meaning (Abbot-Smith et al, 2022; de Villiers et al, 2009) or the number of interpretation options that one can think of when hearing an utterance. For instance, hearing that there is no bowl leaves several alternatives how one could eat cornflakes (e.g., from a soup plate, a cup, and without milk) whereas hearing that there is no paint implies more straightforwardly that the brushes cannot be used as there are fewer possible alternatives how to use a brush.…”