Browsing by Author "Chambers, Craig G."

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    Children’s Attention to Emotional Prosody: Pragmatic Adjustment in Response to Speaker Conventionality
    (2018-11-19) Thacker, Justine Marie; Graham, Susan A.; Chambers, Craig G.; Pexman, Penny M.; Sedivy, Julie
    In this dissertation, I examined whether children will pragmatically adjust their expectations about a speaker’s referential intent, depending on whether the speaker provided conventional or unconventional descriptions. In Chapter 2, 4- and 5-year-old children were introduced to one of two possible speakers: (1) conventional speaker who demonstrated congruent use of linguistic and affective cues; or (2) unconventional speaker who demonstrated incongruent use of these cues and who was described as saying “things in a strange way”. Test trials consisted of displays containing pairs of objects that belonged to the same category, but that differed in terms of their likelihood of association with negative or positive emotional prosody (broken doll/intact doll), accompanied by referentially ambiguous instructions (“Look at the doll”) spoken in either a positive- or negative-sounding voice. Results indicated that children in the conventional speaker condition directed a greater proportion of looks to the negative object during negative emotional prosody trials, compared to positive emotional prosody trials. In contrast, there was no effect of emotional prosody in the unconventional speaker condition. In Chapter 3, I further examined the extent to which children will suspend their use of emotional prosody for an unconventional speaker. In Experiment 2, the experimenter's description of the speaker's trait was replaced with a neutral statement, but examples of the speaker’s incongruent use of linguistic and affective cues were retained. Again, children suspended their use of emotional prosody as a cue to referential intent. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were introduced to two different versions of an unconventional speaker that varied in terms of how related their unconventionality was to their use of emotional prosody. Results demonstrated that speaker unconventionality that was closely related to emotional expression had an effect on children’s use of emotional prosody. However, when speaker unconventionality was unrelated to emotional expression, 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children returned to their original pattern of looking whereby the used emotional prosody to resolve referential intent. This selectivity in response to different speakers provides compelling evidence that social-pragmatic reasoning underlies preschoolers’ interpretation of emotional prosody. Chapter 4 summarizes and explores the aforementioned findings in greater detail.
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    Contextual influences on children's use of vocal affect cues during referential interpretation
    (Routledge, 2012-09) Berman, Jared M. J.; Graham, Susan; Chambers, Craig G.
    In three experiments, we investigated 5-year-olds' sensitivity to speaker vocal affect during referential interpretation in cases where the indeterminacy is or is not resolved by speech information. In Experiment 1, analyses of eye gaze patterns and pointing behaviours indicated that 5-year-olds used vocal affect cues at the point where an ambiguous description was encountered. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used unambiguous situations to investigate how the referential context influences the ability to use affect cues earlier in the utterance. Here, we found a differential use of speaker vocal affect whereby 5-year-olds' referential hypotheses were influenced by negative vocal affect cues in advance of the noun, but not by positive affect cues. Together, our findings reveal how 5-year-olds use a speaker's vocal affect to identify potential referents in different contextual situations and also suggest that children may be more attuned to negative vocal affect than positive vocal affect, particularly early in an utterance.
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    Five-Year-Olds' and Adults' Use of Paralinguistic Cues to Overcome Referential Uncertainty
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2018-01) Thacker, Justine Marie; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan A.
    An eye-tracking methodology was used to explore adults' and children's use of two utterance-based cues to overcome referential uncertainty in real time. Participants were first introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then produced fluent ("Look! Look at the blicket.") or disfluent ("Look! Look at thee, uh, blicket.") instructions referring to novel objects in a display containing both talker-preferred and talker-dispreferred colored items. Adults (Expt 1, n = 24) directed a greater proportion of looks to talker-preferred objects during the initial portion of the utterance ("Look! Look at…"), reflecting the use of indexical cues for talker identity. However, they immediately reduced consideration of an object bearing the talker's preferred color when the talker was disfluent, suggesting they infer disfluency would be more likely as a talker describes dispreferred objects. Like adults, 5-year-olds (Expt 2, n = 27) directed more attention to talker-preferred objects during the initial portion of the utterance. Children's initial predictions, however, were not modulated when disfluency was encountered. Together, these results demonstrate that adults, but not 5-year-olds, can act on information from two talker-produced cues within an utterance, talker preference, and speech disfluencies, to establish reference.
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    The object of my desire: Five-year-olds rapidly reason about a speaker's desire during referential communication
    (Elsevier : Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2017-01) San Juan, Valerie; Chambers, Craig G.; Berman, Jared M. J.; Humphry, Chelsea; Graham, Susan
    Two experiments examined whether 5-year-olds draw inferences about desire outcomes that constrain their online interpretation of an utterance. Children were informed of a speaker's positive (Experiment 1) or negative (Experiment 2) desire to receive a specific toy as a gift before hearing a referentially ambiguous statement ("That's my present") spoken with either a happy or sad voice. After hearing the speaker express a positive desire, children (N=24) showed an implicit (i.e., eye gaze) and explicit ability to predict reference to the desired object when the speaker sounded happy, but they showed only implicit consideration of the alternate object when the speaker sounded sad. After hearing the speaker express a negative desire, children (N=24) used only happy prosodic cues to predict the intended referent of the statement. Taken together, the findings indicate that the efficiency with which 5-year-olds integrate desire reasoning with language processing depends on the emotional valence of the speaker's voice but not on the type of desire representations (i.e., positive vs. negative) that children must reason about online.
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    Preschoolers Flexibly Shift Between Speakers' Perspectives During Real-Time Language Comprehension
    (Society for Research In Child Development, 2019-06-20) Khu, Melanie; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan
    In communicative situations, preschoolers use shared knowledge, or "common ground," to guide their interpretation of a speaker's referential intent. Using eye-tracking measures, this study investigated the time course of 4-year-olds' (n = 95) use of two different speakers' perspectives and assessed how individual differences in this ability related to individual differences in executive function and representational skills. Gaze measures indicated partner-specific common ground guided children's interpretation from the earliest moments of language processing. Non-egocentric online processing was positively correlated with performance on a Level 2 visual perspective-taking task. These results demonstrate that preschoolers readily use the perspectives of multiple partners to guide language comprehension and that more advanced representational skills are associated with the rapid integration of common ground information.
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    Preschoolers' appreciation of speaker vocal affect as a cue to referential intent
    (Elsevier : Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2010-06) Berman, Jared M. J.; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan
    An eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children's sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded referentially ambiguous instruction (e.g., "Look at the doll"). The intonation of the instruction varied in terms of the speaker's vocal affect: positive-sounding, negative-sounding, or neutral. Analyses of eye gaze patterns indicated that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, were more likely to look to the referent whose state matched the speaker's vocal affect as the noun was heard (e.g., looked more often to the broken doll referent in the negative affect condition). These findings indicate that 4-year-olds can use speaker affect to help identify referential mappings during on-line comprehension.
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    Preschoolers' real-time coordination of vocal and facial emotional information
    (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2016-10) Berman, Jared M. J.; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan
    An eye-tracking methodology was used to examine the time course of 3- and 5-year-olds' ability to link speech bearing different acoustic cues to emotion (i.e., happy-sounding, neutral, and sad-sounding intonation) to photographs of faces reflecting different emotional expressions. Analyses of saccadic eye movement patterns indicated that, for both 3- and 5-year-olds, sad-sounding speech triggered gaze shifts to a matching (sad-looking) face from the earliest moments of speech processing. However, it was not until approximately 800ms into a happy-sounding utterance that preschoolers began to use the emotional cues from speech to identify a matching (happy-looking) face. Complementary analyses based on conscious/controlled behaviors (children's explicit points toward the faces) indicated that 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, could successfully match happy-sounding and sad-sounding vocal affect to a corresponding emotional face. Together, the findings clarify developmental patterns in preschoolers' implicit versus explicit ability to coordinate emotional cues across modalities and highlight preschoolers' greater sensitivity to sad-sounding speech as the auditory signal unfolds in time.
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    Preschoolers' sensitivity to referential ambiguity: evidence for a dissociation between implicit understanding and explicit behavior
    (Blackwell, 2008-07) Nilsen, Elizabeth S.; Graham, Susan; Smith, Shannon; Chambers, Craig G.
    Four-year-olds were asked to assess an adult listener's knowledge of the location of a hidden sticker after the listener was provided an ambiguous or unambiguous description of the sticker location. When preschoolers possessed private knowledge about the sticker location, the location they chose indicated that they judged a description to be unambiguous even when the message was ambiguous from the listener's perspective. However, measures of implicit awareness (response latencies and eye movement measures) demonstrated that even when preschoolers had private knowledge about the sticker location, ambiguous messages led to more consideration of an alternative location and longer response latencies than unambiguous messages. The findings demonstrate that children show sensitivity to linguistic ambiguity earlier than previously thought and, further, that they can detect linguistic ambiguity in language directed to others even when their own knowledge clarifies the intended meaning.
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    Preschoolers' sensitivity to speaker action constraints to infer referential intent
    (Elsevier : Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2012-05) Collins, Sarah J.; Graham, Susan; Chambers, Craig G.
    We investigated how preschoolers use their understanding of the actions available to a speaker to resolve referential ambiguity. In this study, 58 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with arrays of eight objects in a toy house and were instructed to retrieve various objects from the display. The trials varied in terms of whether the speaker's hands were empty or full when she requested an object as well as whether the request was ambiguous (i.e., more than one potential referent) or unambiguous (i.e., only one potential referent). Results demonstrated that both 3- and 4-year-olds were sensitive to speaker action constraints and used this information to guide on-line processing (as indexed by eye gaze measures) and to make explicit referential decisions.
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    The role of syntactic form in incremental referential interpretation
    (2003) Edwards, Jodi; Chambers, Craig G.
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    When hearsay trumps evidence: How generic language guides preschoolers’ inferences about unfamiliar things
    (Routledge, 2008-01) Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan A.; Turner, Juanita N.
    Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds’ use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or non-generic sentences (e.g., These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly). Children’s willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then measured. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that children reliably extended the property to new instances after hearing generic but not non-generic sentences. Further, the influence of generic language was much greater than effects related to amount of tangible evidence provided (the number of creatures bearing the critical property). Experiment 2 revealed that children continued to extend properties mentioned in generic descriptions even when incompatible evidence was presented (e.g., an example of an unfriendly ‘pagon’). The findings underscore preschoolers’ keen understanding of the semantics of generic sentences and suggest that inferences based on generics are more robust than those based on observationally-grounded evidence.
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    When it is apt to adapt: Flexible reasoning guides children's use of talker identity and disfluency cues
    (Elsevier, 2018-01) Graham, Susan A; Thacker, Justine Marie; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan A.
    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.
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    When You're Happy and I Know It: Four-Year-Olds' Emotional Perspective Taking During Online Language Comprehension
    (Society for Research In Child Development, 2018-11) Khu, Melanie; Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan
    Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time interpretation of ambiguous statements. However, these sensitivities were less apparent in overt responses, suggesting preschoolers' ability to integrate emotional perspective cues is at an emergent state. Perspective taking during online language processing was positively correlated with receptive vocabulary and an offline measure of emotional perspective taking, but not with cognitive perspective taking, conflict or delay inhibitory control, or working memory. Together, the results underscore how children's emerging communicative competence involves different kinds of perspective inferences with distinct cognitive underpinnings.