5-year-olds' Use of Disfluency and Speaker Identity in Referential Communication
Date
2015-08-05
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Abstract
Filled pauses, once thought to be an extraneous aspect of language, play an important role in communication by serving as a signal of speaker difficulty. If children can make such attributions, then their interpretation of filled pauses should be speaker-specific. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, listeners were introduced to two characters with gender-typed colour preferences. These characters instructed children to look at pink or blue objects in a display using fluent (“Look at the X”) and disfluent (“Look at thee, uh, X”) instructions. Experiment 1indicated that 5-year-olds did not make any referential predictions. With the addition of filler trials, Experiment 2 indicated that 5-year-olds and adults anticipated reference to gender-typed objects during the baseline interval (“Look at”), and disfluent instructions led listeners to amend this prediction. These results suggest that children use disfluency as a marker to adjust their speaker-specific referential predictions.
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Psychology--Clinical, Psychology--Cognitive, Psychology--Developmental
Citation
Thacker, J. (2015). 5-year-olds' Use of Disfluency and Speaker Identity in Referential Communication (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24624