Preschoolers Flexibly Shift Between Speakers' Perspectives During Real‐Time Language Comprehension

Khu, Melanie; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan A.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13270

Cited by 19 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…When information integration is studied directly, the focus is mostly on how children interpret an ambiguous referring expression in light of social-contextual information. [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] In one classic study, 32 children faced a 2 x 2 display with a ball, a pen and two glasses in it.…”

Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

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How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current knowledge state as well as the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a model according to which children consider all available information sources and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-to-5 year-old children’s word learning across a range of experimental conditions. Model comparison suggests that the integration process is stable across development and that the main locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources. We present a quantitative developmental theory of information integration for language learning, embedded in a larger framework that grounds language use and learning in social cognition.

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Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This study advanced our understanding by documenting that preschoolers use both information sources, a finding confirmed by a variety of other work. 25,28,30 Yet these studies do not specify -or test -the process by which children integrate different information sources.…”

Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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show abstract

“…From 3 years onwards, children use partner specific referential expressions (referential pacts), both with adults and peers (Köymen, Schmerse, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2014;Matthews, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2010). Interestingly, speaker identity influences children's interpretation of ambiguous utterances at an early point in language processing (Khu, Chambers, & Graham, 2019;San Juan, Khu, & Graham, 2015). However, these social inferences based on the identity of the conversational partners have rarely been studied in conjunction with discourse inferences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Bohn

Peloquin

et al. 2020

Developmental Science

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In conversation, speech is almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history ("common ground"). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2-to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. Children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3-and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun it as referring to another member of the same category. In study 2, 4-year-olds only interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between age 2 and 5.

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“…Finally, given that studies on children's looking behavior in other pragmatic tasks (such as scalar implicature comprehension or reference resolution) found elaborate fixation patterns for utterances that required inferencing (Graham et al, 2014;Huang & Snedeker, 2009;Khu et al, 2019;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Nilsen et al, 2008;Yoon et al, 2015), we expected to find more elaborate fixation patterns for indirect compared to direct communicative acts.…”

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confidence: 96%

Children understand communication intuitively but indirect communication makes them think twice – Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns

Schulze¹,

Buttelmann²

2020

Preprint

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Interpreting a speaker’s communicative acts is a challenge children are facing permanently in everyday live. In doing so, they seem to understand direct communicative acts more easily than indirect communicative acts. The present study investigated which step in the processing of communicative acts might cause difficulties in understanding indirect communication. To assess the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon, we tested 3- and 5-year-old children (N=105) using eyetracking and an object-choice task. The children watched videos that showed puppets during their every-day activities (e.g., pet care). For every activity, the puppets were asked which of two objects (e.g., rabbit or dog) they would rather have. The puppets responded either directly (“I want the rabbit”) or indirectly (“I have a carrot”). Results showed that children chose the object intended by the puppets more often in the direct- than in the indirect-communication condition, and 5-year-olds chose correctly more than 3-year-olds. However, even though we found that children’s pupil size increased while hearing the utterances, we found no effect for communication type before children had already decided on the correct object during object selection by looking at it. Only after this point, that is, only in children’s further fixation patterns and reaction times did differences for communication type occur. Thus, although children’s object-choice performance suggests that indirect communication is harder to understand than direct communication, the cognitive demands during processing both communication types seem similar. We discuss theoretical implications of these findings for developmental pragmatics in terms of a dual-process account of communication comprehension.

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Preschoolers Flexibly Shift Between Speakers' Perspectives During Real‐Time Language Comprehension

Cited by 19 publications

References 58 publications

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Children understand communication intuitively but indirect communication makes them think twice – Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns

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