TY - JOUR
T1 - What’s New to You? Preschoolers’ Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency
AU - Yoon, Si On
AU - Jin, Kyong Sun
AU - Brown-Schmidt, Sarah
AU - Fisher, Cynthia L.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright © 2021 Yoon, Jin, Brown-Schmidt and Fisher.
PY - 2021/1/8
Y1 - 2021/1/8
N2 - Speech disfluencies (e.g., “Point to thee um turtle”) can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.
AB - Speech disfluencies (e.g., “Point to thee um turtle”) can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.
KW - common ground
KW - disfluency
KW - eye-tracking
KW - partner-specificity
KW - pragmatic inference
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85099767912&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85099767912&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612601
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612601
M3 - Article
C2 - 33488480
AN - SCOPUS:85099767912
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 11
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
M1 - 612601
ER -