Browsing by Author "San Juan, Valerie"

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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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    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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    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.