When it is apt to adapt: Flexible reasoning guides children’s use of talker identity and disfluency cues

Abstract

An eye-tracking methodology was used to examine whether children flexibly engage two voice-based cues, talker identity and disfluency, during language processing. Across two experiments, 5-year-olds (N = 58) were introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then used fluent or disfluent instructions to refer to an object in a display containing items bearing either talker-preferred or talker-dispreferred colors. As the utterance began to unfold, the 5-year-olds anticipated that talkers would refer to talker-preferred objects. When children then encountered a disfluency in the unfolding description, they reduced their expectation that a talker was about to refer to a preferred object. The talker preference-related predictions, but not the disfluency-related predictions, were attenuated during the second half of the experiment as evidence accrued that talkers referred to dispreferred objects with equal frequency. In Experiment 2, the equivocal nature of talkers' referencing was made more apparent by removing neutral filler trials, where objects' colors were not associated with talker preferences. In this case, children ceased making all talker-related predictions during the latter half of the experiment. Taken together, the results provide insights into children's use of talker-specific cues and demonstrate that flexible and adaptive forms of reasoning account for the ways in which children draw on paralinguistic information during real-time processing.

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

“…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.…”

“…Subsequent research has extended this work to show that children's predictive use of speech disfluencies is robust with previously reliable speakers, but not with previously unreliable speakers (Orena & White, 2015). Disfluencies may also provide cues to children about a speaker's preference for particular objects (Thacker, Chambers, & Graham, 2018). Additionally, three-year-olds can use disfluencies to predict that a speaker will label an object that is perceptually familiar but novel to the discourse (e.g., a familiar object that has not previously been mentioned; Owens & Graham, 2016).…”

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

“…In contrast, children did not use speech fluency cues to revise their hypotheses when forming referential predictions. This finding was somewhat surprising, given that recent research has demonstrated that 5-year-old children can indeed engage these same two cues during language processing in other contexts ( Thacker et al, 2018 ). However, an important difference between these two paradigms is that in Thacker et al (2018) the referents were familiar, whereas the present study used novel objects and labels.…”

“…This finding was somewhat surprising, given that recent research has demonstrated that 5-year-old children can indeed engage these same two cues during language processing in other contexts ( Thacker et al, 2018 ). However, an important difference between these two paradigms is that in Thacker et al (2018) the referents were familiar, whereas the present study used novel objects and labels. If disfluencies in the present study signaled that the talker was likely to refer to the unfamiliar-to-them object (i.e., the talker-non-preferred object), then it is understandable that children did not use the disfluency cue, as this result then echoes previous findings suggesting that children of this age do not associate disfluency with unfamiliarity alone ( 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 ). For the present study, we sought to explore whether this ability can also support preschoolers’ formation of referential predictions for novel objects.…”