Browsing by Author "Chambers, Craig G"

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    Generic language and speaker confidence guide preschoolers' inferences about novel animate kinds
    (APA, 2009-05) Stock, Hayli R; Graham, Susan A; Chambers, Craig G
    We investigated the influence of speaker certainty on 156 four-year-old children's sensitivity to generic and nongeneric statements. An inductive inference task was implemented, in which a speaker described a nonobvious property of a novel creature using either a generic or a nongeneric statement. The speaker appeared to be confident, neutral, or uncertain about the information being relayed. Preschoolers were subsequently asked if a second exemplar shared the same property as the first. Preschoolers consistently extended properties to additional exemplars only when properties were described in a generic form by a confident or neutral speaker. If a speaker appeared to be uncertain or if statements were made in a nongeneric form, properties were not consistently extended beyond the first exemplar. The findings demonstrate that children integrate the inductive cues provided by generic language with social cues when reasoning about abstract kinds.
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    Preschoolers use emotion in speech to learn new words
    (Society for Research In Child Development, 2013-02) Callaway, Dallas; Chambers, Craig G; Berman, Jared M. J.; Graham, Susan
    Two experiments examined 4- and 5-year-olds' use of vocal affect to learn new words. In Experiment 1 (n = 48), children were presented with two unfamiliar objects, first in their original state and then in an altered state (broken or enhanced). An instruction produced with negative, neutral, or positive affect, directed children to find the referent of a novel word. During the novel noun, eye gaze measures indicated that both 4- and 5-year-olds were more likely to consider an object congruent with vocal affect cues. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds (n = 15) were asked to extend and generalize their initial mapping to new exemplars. Here, 5-year-olds generalized these newly-mapped labels but only when presented with negative vocal affect.