Graham, SusanThacker, Justine2015-08-052015-11-202015-08-052015Thacker, 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/24624http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2378Filled 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.engUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.Psychology--ClinicalPsychology--CognitivePsychology--DevelopmentalLanguage ProcessingSpeech DisfluencyReference Comprehensionmaster thesis10.11575/PRISM/24624