Browsing by Author "Khu, Melanie"

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    Distinct labels attenuate 15-month-olds' attention to shape in an inductive inference task
    (Frontiers in Psychology, 2013-01) Graham, Susan; Keates, Jeany; Vukatana, Ena; Khu, Melanie
    We examined the role of distinct labels on infants' inductive inferences. Thirty-six 15-month-old infants were presented with target objects that possessed a non-obvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity relative to the target. Infants were tested in one of two groups, a Same Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with the same noun, and a Distinct Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with different nouns. When target and test objects were labeled with the same count noun, infants generalized the non-obvious property to both test objects, regardless of similarity to the target. In contrast, labeling the target and test objects with different count nouns attenuated infants' generalization of the non-obvious property to both high and low-similarity test objects. Our results suggest that by 15 months, infants recognize that object labels provide information about underlying object kind and appreciate that distinct labels are used to designate members of different categories.
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    Distinct labels attenuate 15-month-olds' attention to shape in an inductive inference task
    (Frontiers in Psychology, 2013-01) Graham, Susan; Keates, Jeany; Vukatana, Ena; Khu, Melanie
    We examined the role of distinct labels on infants' inductive inferences. Thirty-six 15-month-old infants were presented with target objects that possessed a non-obvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity relative to the target. Infants were tested in one of two groups, a Same Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with the same noun, and a Distinct Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with different nouns. When target and test objects were labeled with the same count noun, infants generalized the non-obvious property to both test objects, regardless of similarity to the target. In contrast, labeling the target and test objects with different count nouns attenuated infants' generalization of the non-obvious property to both high and low-similarity test objects. Our results suggest that by 15 months, infants recognize that object labels provide information about underlying object kind and appreciate that distinct labels are used to designate members of different categories.
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    ELIA: a software application for integrating spoken language and eye movements
    (Springer, 2013-01) Berman, Jared M. J.; Khu, Melanie; Graham, Ian; Graham, Susan
    We have developed a new software application, Eye-gaze Language Integration Analysis (ELIA), which allows for the rapid integration of gaze data with spoken language input (either live or prerecorded). Specifically, ELIA integrates E-Prime output and/or .csv files that include eye-gaze and real-time language information. The process of combining eye movements with real-time speech often involves multiple error-prone steps (e.g., cleaning, transposing, graphing) before a simple time course analysis plot can be viewed or before data can be imported into a statistical package. Some of the advantages of this freely available software include (1) reducing the amount of time spent preparing raw eye-tracking data for analysis; (2) allowing for the quick analysis of pilot data in order to identify issues with experimental design; (3) facilitating the separation of trial types, which allows for the examination of supplementary effects (e.g., order or gender effects); and (4) producing standard output files (i.e., .csv files) that can be read by numerous spreadsheet packages and transferred to any statistical software.
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    Learning from picture books: Infants' use of naming information
    (Frontiers in Psychology, 2014-01) Khu, Melanie; Graham, Susan; Ganea, Patricia A.
    The present study investigated whether naming would facilitate infants' transfer of information from picture books to the real world. Eighteen- and 21-month-olds learned a novel label for a novel object depicted in a picture book. Infants then saw a second picture book in which an adult demonstrated how to elicit the object's non-obvious property. Accompanying narration described the pictures using the object's newly learnt label. Infants were subsequently tested with the real-world object depicted in the book, as well as a different-color exemplar. Infants' performance on the test trials was compared with that of infants in a no label condition. When presented with the exact object depicted in the picture book, 21-month-olds were significantly more likely to attempt to elicit the object's non-obvious property than were 18-month-olds. Learning the object's label before learning about the object's hidden property did not improve 18-month-olds' performance. At 21-months, the number of infants in the label condition who attempted to elicit the real-world object's non-obvious property was greater than would be predicted by chance, but the number of infants in the no label condition was not. Neither age group nor label condition predicted test performance for the different-color exemplar. The findings are discussed in relation to infants' learning and transfer from picture books.
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    Learning from picture books: The effect of naming on infants’ transfer of nonobvious properties
    (2012-10-01) Khu, Melanie; Graham, Susan
    The present study investigated whether naming would facilitate infants’ transfer of information from picture books to the real world. Independent groups of 18- and 21-month-olds were shown a picture book that taught them a novel label for a novel object. Infants then saw a second picture book in which an adult demonstrated how to elicit the object’s nonobvious property. Accompanying narration described the pictures using the object’s newly learned label. Infants were subsequently tested with the real-world object depicted in the book and a different-colour exemplar. Infants’ performance on the test trials was compared with that of infants in a no label condition. The odds of attempting to elicit the object’s nonobvious property with the exact object depicted in the book were almost 2.5 times greater for infants who heard the label compared to infants who did not. Naming did not predict test performance for the different-colour exemplar.
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    A New Perspective on Children's Communicative Perspective Taking: When and How Do Children Use Perspective Inferences to Inform Their Comprehension of Spoken Language?
    (Society for Research In Child Development, 2015-01) San Juan, Valerie; Khu, Melanie; Graham, Susan A.
    Successful communication often requires a listener to reason about a speaker’s perspective to make inferences about communicative intent. Although children can use perspective reasoning to influence their interpretation of spoken utterances, when and how children integrate perspective reasoning with language comprehension remain unclear. These questions are central to theoretical debates in language processing and have led to competing accounts of communicative perspective taking: early versus late integration. In this article, we examine how developmental evidence addresses the predictions of each account. Specifically, we review evidence to determine whether children can rapidly integrate perspective inferences when processing spoken language while central abilities (i.e., executive function and theory of mind) are still emerging.
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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’ Emotional and Cognitive Perspective-taking During Online Language Processing
    (2016) Khu, Melanie; Graham, Susan; Sedivy, Julie; Hala, Suzanne; Wilcox, Gabrielle; Matthews, Danielle
    Successful communication often depends on the ability to take the perspective of one’s conversational partner. In this dissertation, I investigated 4-year-olds’ perspective-taking during online spoken language processing. Using two novel communication tasks, I addressed the question of when, during real-time processing, preschoolers integrate perspective information with linguistic input – a question central to an on-going theoretical debate within the psycholinguistic literature. Further, I examined how individual differences in communicative perspective-taking relate to individual differences in mental and emotional representational skills, executive function, and receptive vocabulary. In Chapter 2, I examined preschoolers’ use of two communicative partners’ perspectives to guide their online language processing. Children participated in a visual perspective-taking task during which two speakers alternated providing the child referential instructions. Eye-tracking results demonstrated that preschoolers reliably took the active speaker’s perspective into account, using this information within the earliest moments of language processing. Preschoolers’ explicit referential decisions (i.e., pointing) also demonstrated consistent sensitivity to the active speaker’s perspective. Children with better mental representational skills demonstrated less egocentricity in their online processing. In Chapter 3, I investigated preschoolers’ communicative perspective-taking using an affectively-evocative, emotional perspective-taking task. Eye gaze measures indicated that children used the speaker’s vocal affect to make inferences about her emotional state and correspondingly, her communicative intent. However, children’s online sensitivity to the speaker’s emotional perspective was only weakly reflected in their overt responses, suggesting their ability to integrate emotional perspective cues with linguistic information is at an emergent state. Children’s emotional perspective-taking during online processing was related to their emotional, but not mental, representational skills, as well as the size of their receptive vocabulary. Together, these findings demonstrate that 4-year-olds use information about speakers’ perspectives to guide their real-time language comprehension in a range of communicative contexts. The question of when preschoolers integrated perspective information with linguistic input depended on the nature of the perspective representations involved. Examination of individual differences revealed an important role for children’s representational skills in supporting perspective-taking during communication. This dissertation highlights the need for theoretical accounts of language processing to incorporate findings from a wider range of communicative contexts.
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    That's not what you said earlier: preschoolers expect partners to be referentially consistent
    (Cambridge University Press, 2013-02) Graham, Susan; Sedivy, Julie; Khu, Melanie
    In a conversation, adults expect speakers to be consistent in their use of a particular expression. We examine whether four-year-olds expect speakers to use consistent referential descriptions and whether these expectations are partner-specific. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we presented four-year-olds with arrays of objects on a screen. During training, Experimenter 1 (E1) used a target expression to identify one object (i.e. "the spotted dog" to identify a dog that is both spotted and fluffy). Following training, either E1 or a new conversational partner (E2) presented children with test trials. Here, the target objects were referred to using either the original expression (e.g. "the spotted dog") or a new expression (e.g. "the fluffy dog"). Eye-movements indicated that preschoolers were quicker to identify the target referent when the original expression was used by the same speaker. This suggests that four-year-olds, like adults, expect communicative partners to adhere to referential pacts.
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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.
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    Words are not enough: how preschoolers' integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding
    (Cambridge University Press, 2017-05) Graham, Susan; San Juan, Valerie; Khu, Melanie
    When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers' tendency to use cues both within the communicative context (i.e. a speaker's visual access to information) and within the speech signal itself (i.e. emotional prosody) to make on-line inferences about communicative intent. Our review demonstrates that preschoolers' ability to use visual and emotional cues of perspective to guide language interpretation is not uniform across tasks, is sometimes related to theory of mind and executive function skills, and, at certain points of development, is only revealed by implicit measures of language processing.