Browsing by Author "Graham, Susan A"

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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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    Intergenerational Transmission of Chronic Pain: A Narrative Analysis of Story(telling) of Pain Journeys as Social Learning Between Parents and Youth
    (2021-09-17) Lund, Tatiana C.; Noel, Melanie E.; Birnie, Kathryn A M; Graham, Susan A; Orr, Serena L
    Background. Chronic headache is highly prevalent and persistent from childhood into adulthood and has a strong intergenerational component. The intergenerational transmission of chronic pain conceptual model posits that parental social learning factors may exert a powerful influence on children who also have chronic pain. (Story)telling occurs intergenerationally within families and between children and their parents, an avenue of social learning not previous explored. This study examined narratives of parent-child dyads where both members had pain. Method. Twenty-six youth and parents with chronic headaches recruited from a tertiary level pediatric pain clinic separately completed in-depth interviews about children’s pain journey narratives. Narrative analysis incorporated elements of socio-narratology to compare between and within dyads. Results. Five narrative types were generated: 1) Mistreated by the Medical System- neglect, harm and broken promises resulting in learned hopelessness or relying on the family system, 2) Washed Away by the Pain-unable to overcome insurmountable challenges and letting the pain take over, 3) The Invalidated-invalidation of pain permeated youth’s lives, with mothers as empathic buffers, 4) The Trauma Origin Story- parents, but not youth, positing traumatic events as the causal link to children’s pain, and 5) Taking the Power Back from Pain- children’s ability to live life and accomplish goals in spite of pain. Discussion. Findings support the clinical utility of narrative in pediatric pain, including both parents’ and children’s narrative accounts to improve clinical encounters and broader social implications of chronic pain.
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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.