Browsing by Author "Thacker, Justine Marie"
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- ItemOpen AccessChildren’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, JulieIn 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.
- ItemOpen AccessDisfluencies signal reference to novel objects for adults but not children(Cambridge University Press : Journal of Child Language, 2018-01) Owens, Sarah J.; Thacker, Justine Marie; Graham, SusanSpeech disfluencies can guide the ways in which listeners interpret spoken language. Here, we examined whether three-year-olds, five-year-olds, and adults use filled pauses to anticipate that a speaker is likely to refer to a novel object. Across three experiments, participants were presented with pairs of novel and familiar objects and heard a speaker refer to one of the objects using a fluent ("Look at the ball/lep!") or disfluent ("Look at thee uh ball/lep!") expression. The salience of the speaker's unfamiliarity with the novel referents, and the way in which the speaker referred to the novel referents (i.e., a noun vs. a description) varied across experiments. Three- and five-year-olds successfully identified familiar and novel targets, but only adults' looking patterns reflected increased looks to novel objects in the presence of a disfluency. Together, these findings demonstrate that adults, but not young children, use filled pauses to anticipate reference to novel objects.
- ItemOpen AccessFive-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.
- ItemOpen AccessWhen 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.