What young children think you see when their eyes are closed

The common assumption that young children egocentrically believe you cannot see them when their own eyes are closed was investigated in two studies. It was found that 2.5-4-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds and adults, would indeed often give negative reply to the experimenter's question “Do I see you?” when their eyes were closed and covered with their hands. However, they would also correctly reply that the experimenter did see their arm and an object placed in front of them and did not see their eyes and back, indicating that they were making veridical, nonegocentric inferences about the experimenter's visual experience. In addition, their eyes being visible to the experimenter did not prove to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition for their judgment that the experimenter could see “them” (“you”). It was concluded that, in this context, adults take “you” to mean their whole body while young children take it to mean primarily their face region. Speculations were made as to how young children could have acquired this meaning, and about possible similarities and differences between the self conceptions of young children and adults.     

The relations between children's communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning

Two experiments investigated children’s communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document children’s emergent use of the perspective of their speaking partner to guide their communicative behaviors in both a production and comprehension task. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-old children used a speaker’s perspective to guide their interpretation of instructions. In both experiments, egocentric interpretations of speaker requests were negatively correlated with children’s inhibitory control skills. Results of these studies demonstrate that young children can differentiate between information that is accessible to the speaker versus privileged knowledge, and use this information to guide their communicative behaviors. Furthermore, the results suggest that children’s inhibitory control skills allow them to inhibit their own perspective, enabling them to make use of their communicative partner’s perspective.     

Children's strategies in producing three-dimensional relationships on a two-dimensional surface

It is a common task to give children a picture containing implicit depth cues and to require them to extract depth information from it. The cues are always selected from the adult repertoire; little is known about children's production of their own cues. In this experiment, 5- to 10-year-old children were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded by the nearer. The results were an age-related decline in the tendency to segregate the objects and an increase in the tendency to group the objects using partial occlusion, with a cross-over at 8 years. At all ages some children drew one object inside the boundary of the other. It is argued that the results are composed of two tendencies, a gradual mastery of discrete scaling phenomena (e.g., “up” on the page means “further”) within a given style, and a set of decisions to be made between incompatible styles.     

One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog: Factors Affecting Children's Syntactic Choices in Production and Comprehension

Two experiments are reported which examine children's ability to use referential context when making syntactic choices in language production and comprehension. In a recent on-line study of auditory comprehension, Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, and Logrip (1999) examined children's and adults' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving prepositional phrases (e.g., “Put the frog on the napkin into ¨”). Although adults and older children used the referential context to guide their initial analysis (pursuing a destination interpretation in a one-frog context and a modifier interpretation in a two-frog context), 4 to 5-year olds' initial and ultimate analysis was one of destination, regardless of context. The present studies examined whether these differences were attributable to the comprehension process itself or to other sources, such as possible differences in how children perceive the scene and referential situation. In both experiments, children were given a language generation task designed to elicit and test children's ability to refer to a member of a set through restrictive modification. This task was immediately followed by the “put” comprehension task. The findings showed that, in response to a question about a member of a set (e.g., “Which frog went to Mrs. Squid's house?”), 4- to 5-year-olds frequently produced a definite NP with a restrictive prepositional modifier (e.g., “The one on the napkin”). These same children, however, continued to misanalyze put instructions, showing a strong avoidance of restrictive modification during comprehension. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in the salience of the platforms that distinguished the two referents increased overall performance, but still showed the strong asymmetry between production and comprehension. Eye movements were also recorded in Experiment 2, revealing on-line parsing patterns similar to Trueswell et al.: an initial preference for a destination analysis and a failure to revise early referential commitments. These experiments indicate that child–adult differences in parsing preferences arise, in part, from developmental changes in the comprehension process itself and not from a general insensitivity to referential properties of the scene. The findings are consistent with a probabilistic model for uncovering the structure of the input during comprehension, in which more reliable linguistic and discourse-related cues are learned first, followed by a gradually developing ability to take into account other more uncertain (or more difficult to learn) cues to structure.     

Embodied Simulations Are Modulated by Sentential Perspective

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical‐semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first‐ versus third‐person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First‐person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body (e.g., “You threw the microphone,” “You caught the microphone”) modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front‐back axis, consistent with the action‐sentence compatibility effect (ACE). This effect was not observed for third‐person sentences (“He threw the microphone,” “He caught the microphone”). The ACE was observed when making responses along a left‐right axis for third‐person, but not first‐person sentences. Abstract sentences (e.g., “He heard the message”) did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence.     

Frames of reference in spatial language acquisition

Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. It is unknown how children acquire the particular frame-of-reference terms in their language (e.g., left/right, north/south). The present paper uses a word-learning paradigm to investigate 4-year-old English-speaking children’s acquisition of such terms. In Part I, with five experiments, we contrasted children’s acquisition of novel word pairs meaning left-right and north-south to examine their initial hypotheses and the relative ease of learning the meanings of these terms. Children interpreted ambiguous spatial terms as having environment-based meanings akin to north and south, and they readily learned and generalized north-south meanings. These studies provide the first direct evidence that children invoke geocentric representations in spatial language acquisition. However, the studies leave unanswered how children ultimately acquire “left” and “right.” In Part II, with three more experiments, we investigated why children struggle to master body-based frame-of-reference words. Children successfully learned “left” and “right” when the novel words were systematically introduced on their own bodies and extended these words to novel (intrinsic and relative) uses; however, they had difficulty learning to talk about the left and right sides of a doll. This difficulty was paralleled in identifying the left and right sides of the doll in a non-linguistic memory task. In contrast, children had no difficulties learning to label the front and back sides of a doll. These studies begin to paint a detailed account of the acquisition of spatial terms in English, and provide insights into the origins of diverse spatial reference frames in the world’s languages.     

Classes,collections, and distinctive features: Alternative strategies for solving inclusion problems

This study analyzed the strategies that children ages 5 through 8 years used on two modified versions of Inhelder and Piaget's (The early growth of logic in the child. New York: Norton, 1964) class inclusion task. In two experiments, children were tested on Wilkinson's (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 64–85) “percept” inclusion task in which distinctive features marked both supraordinate and subclasses. It was hypothesized that children who fail standard Piagetian inclusion tasks succeed on the “percept” task by counting and comparing mutually exclusive features rather than using features as markers for classes and subclasses. The hypothesis was supported by children's performances on “percept” tasks in which solutions based on feature counting conflicted with solutions based on consideration of class inclusion relations. In two other experiments, children answered part-whole and part-part comparison questions in which both terms were described as classes and/or subclasses, or in which one of the two terms was described as a collection (e.g., a bunch of grapes). These experiments contrasted Markman and Seibert's (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 561–577) “organization” hypothesis that the greater psychological integrity of collections facilitates reasoning on part-whole comparison problems with the hypothesis that the faciltative effect results from the “large number” connotation of collective nouns. Results on collection problems in which parts were described as collections supported the “large number” hypothesis. Results were discussed in terms of their implications for Piaget's theory.     

Preschoolers’ appreciation of speaker vocal affect as a cue to referential intent

An eye tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children’s sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded referentially ambiguous instruction (e.g., “Look at the doll”). The intonation of the instruction varied in terms of the speaker’s vocal affect: positive-sounding, negative-sounding, or neutral. Analyses of eye gaze patterns indicated that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, were more likely to look to the referent whose state matched the speaker’s vocal affect as the noun was heard (e.g., looked more often to the broken doll referent in the negative affect condition). These findings indicate that 4-year-olds can use speaker affect to help identify referential mappings during on-line comprehension.     

Numerical development: From the infant to the child. Wynn's (1992) paradigm in 2- and 3-year olds

Wynn (1992) claims that 4- and 5-month-old infants are capable of calculating the exact result of simple arithmetic operations such as “1+1=2”. She observed and tested infant oculomotor behavior using the “reaction to the impossible event” procedure (“1+1=1”, “1+1=3”). Our study used the same paradigm to look into the linguistic future of these protonumerical abilities (i.e., verbal reaction to the impossible event). Forty-eight 2- and 3-year-old children were tested (1) on an adapted version of Wynn's situation and (2) on a number/length-interference task. The results indicated a developmental performance hierarchy in which success on the impossible-event task contrasts with failure on the number/length-interference task (for the same numbers and the same objects). In the impossible-event task there is a clear lag between reactions to “1+1=1” violations, which occur earlier, and reactions to “1+1=3” violations. Wynn (1992) did not find this lag in infants' reactions. The results are discussed in terms of reorganization of the protonumerical abilities, and activation/inhibition strategy.     

La fonction argumentative des marques de la langue

The present paper reports a set of experimental studies concerning the comprehension of French argumentative operators and connectives. The first part is a presentation of the theoretical framework, the methodological problems and some of the most general results. Experiments were carried out in the perspective of the linguistic theory of argumentation developed by Anscombre and Ducrot. According to this theory, a number of devices in language are mainly defined by their argumentation function, i.e. by the types of discursive sequences and conclusions they involve. Three categories of such devices were examined: (1) operators like “presque” (almost), “à peine” (hardly), “au moins” (at least), etc. which give an argumentative orientation to the statement; (2) co-orientation connectives, like “même” (even), which relate two statements oriented towards the same conclusion; (3) counter-orientation connectives, like the concessive ones (“mais” (but), “quand même” (even so), etc.), which relate two statements oriented towards opposite conclusions. The data shed light on issues such as: What is the nature of the relationship between the informative and argumentative functions of different operators? Is there a hierarchical relation between the argumentative processes of “co-orientation” and “counter-orientation”? What is the role of negation in the processing of argumentative sequences? The second part of the paper focuses specifically on the study of how 8 and 10 year-old children process “counter-oriented” statements. Five concessive connectives were studied: “mais”, “pourtant”, “quand même”, “même si”, “bien que”. The test was composed of two successive completion tasks: in one task the children had to choose the relevant context of complex sentences involving concessive connectives; in the other task they had to choose their relevant conclusion. Main results show a clear evolution in the performance of children between 8 and 10, suggesting that concessive strategies are not completely mastered at the age of 8. Differences among the concessive connectives studied were brought out: the item “quand même” obtained much better results than the other items with 8-year-old subjects; statements with “mais” seemed to be better processed in the conclusion task than in the context task, especially by 10-year-old subjects. These results are compared with other data obtained in some of the numerous studies on the production and comprehension of concessive connectives in various languages, and discussed from the point of view of argumentative theory.     

Form and function in children's understanding of ironic utterances

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments. First and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short stories consisting of an utterance by a speaker and contextual information that was either neutral or that biased an ironic or literal interpretation of the utterance. The intonation of the utterance was either stressed or unstressed. Questions were asked about the literal form of the utterance, and the speaker's attitude in using the utterance. The results suggest that evaluation of the literal form and inference to the speaker's intended use of an utterance are independent components of irony comprehension in children: that contextual discrepancy and intonation function differently in cueing these processes; and that children and adults differ both in accomplishing these processes and in the use of these cues.     

“MORE” is “LESS”: Sign language comprehension in deaf and hearing children

Matched groups of deaf children of deaf parents and hearing children of hearing parents were required to indicate which of two glasses contained more or less water. The deaf comprehended the meaning of the highly iconic sign “LESS” across all ages while comprehension of the noniconic sign “MORE” was a function of age. These data, reflecting a “MORE is LESS” effect, were the reverse of the findings for the hearing given speech. When given sign, the performance of the hearing was similar to that of the deaf except for the absence of an age-related increase in “MORE” accuracy. Analyses of response biases revealed differential preferences for the two groups. Results are discussed in terms of the relative iconicity of the two signs and Clark's Semantic Feature Hypotheses.     

On comprehending idioms: Do children get the picture?

This study examines children's comprehension of idioms. First, third, and fifth grade children (6, 8, and 10 years old) and college adults were read short stories containing contextual information and a key terminal sentence. The contextual information biased either an idiomatic, a literal, or am ambiguous (neutral) interpretation of the terminal sentence. The terminal sentence contained either an idiom (“fix his wagon”) or a changed form (“repair his wagon”) of the idiom. These manipulations were used to determine the role of contextual information and the conventional forms of idioms in idiom comprehension. After each story, the subjects were asked to explain the terminal sentence and to answer a “yes-no” question about the action described in the story. The results showed that idiomatic explanations and interpretations occurred more frequently for the idiom than the changed forms, and that there were strong developmental increases in making idiomatic interpretations of both forms. The results are discussed in terms of two current models of idiom comprehension.     

Being In Front Is Good—But Where Is In Front? Preferences for Spatial Referencing Affect Evaluation

Speakers of English frequently associate location in space with valence, as in moving up and down the “social ladder.” If such an association also holds for the sagittal axis, an object “in front of” another object would be evaluated more positively than the one “behind.” Yet how people conceptualize relative locations depends on which frame of reference (FoR) they adopt—and hence on cross-linguistically diverging preferences. What is conceptualized as “in front” in one variant of the relative FoR (e.g., translation) is “behind” under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do such diverging conceptualizations of an object's location also lead to diverging evaluations? In two studies employing an implicit association test, we demonstrate, first, that speakers of German, Chinese, and Japanese indeed evaluate the object “in front of” another object more positively than the one “behind.” Second, and crucially, the reversal of which object is conceptualized as “in front” involves a corresponding reversal of valence, suggesting an impact of linguistically imparted FoR preferences on evaluative processes.     

The privileging of ‘Support-From-Below’ in early spatial language acquisition

Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., “on”, in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Johnston & Slobin, 1979). Such terms apply to a wide variety of support configurations, including Support-From-Below (SFB; cup on table) and Mechanical Support, such as stamps on envelopes, coats on hooks, etc. Research has yet to delineate infants’ semantic space for the term “on” when considering its full range of usage. Do infants initially map “on” to a very broad, highly abstract category – one including cups on tables, stamps on envelopes, etc.? Or do infants begin with a much more restricted interpretation - mapping “on” to certain configurations over others? Much infant cognition research suggests that SFB is an event category that infants learn about early - by five months of age (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017) - raising the possibility that they may also begin by interpreting the word “on” as referring to configurations like cups on tables, rather than stamps on envelopes. Further, studies examining language production suggests that children and adults map the basic locative expression (BE on, in English) to SFB over Mechanical Support (Landau et al., 2016). We tested the hypothesis that this ‘privileging’ of SFB in early infant cognition and child and adult language also characterizes infants’ language comprehension. Using the Intermodal-Preferential-Looking-Paradigm in combination with infant eye-tracking, 20-month-olds were presented with two support configurations: SFB and Mechanical, Support-Via-Adhesion (henceforth, SVA). Infants preferentially mapped “is on” to SFB (rather than SVA) suggesting that infants differentiate between two quite different kinds of support configurations when mapping spatial language to these two configurations and more so, that SFB is privileged in early language understanding of the English spatial term “on”.     

Attributions and other inferences: Processing information about the self versus others

This study focuses on the attributional inferences involved in the comprehension of behaviors and on possible differences between the process of comprehending one's own behaviors and those of another person. Both the content of attributional judgments and the time taken to make the judgments were measured, in a design involving the comprehension of behaviors that were high or low in desirability and distinctiveness and that were understood as the subject's own versus another person's. Results show that the inferential processes in the comprehension of one's own and another's behavior are generally similar. Exceptions are where organized knowledge about the self (a self-schema) is brought into use and where differences in “perspective” between self and other influence processing. Discussion centers on the implications of the results for theories of comprehension and inference, including extensions needed to handle the self/other distinction.     

Excuse inference modification in children and adults

The ability of first- and third-grade children and college adults to make excuse inferences about a speaker's use of an utterance and to modify those inferences appropriately upon receiving later information was examined in four experiments. Short stories containing an utterance by a speaker were read aloud. Utterances in the story were preceded by contextual information that suggested either that the speaker was truthful or making an excuse. Utterances were followed by information that confirmed or disconfirmed the excuse interpretation. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that even first and third graders can make excuse inferences, but these children rarely modify these interpretations upon receiving disconfirming information. In Experiments 2–4 possible reasons for the children's interpretive inflexibility were examined by varying the difficulty of relating the excuse interpretation and succeeding information. Results suggested processing difficulty, as well as an interpretive “set,” contributed to the children's inflexibility.     

The impact of object type on the spatial analogies in Korean preschoolers

We tested young children’s spatial reasoning in a match-to-sample task, manipulating the objects in the task (abstract geometric shapes, line drawings of realistic objects, or both). Korean 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 161) generalized the target spatial configuration (i.e., on, in, above) more easily when the sample used geometric shapes and the choices used realistic objects than the reverse (i.e., realistic-object sample to geometric-shape choices). With within-type stimuli (i.e., sample and choices were both geometric shapes or both realistic objects), 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children generalized the spatial relations more easily with geometric shapes than realistic objects. In addition, children who knew more locative terms (e.g., “in”, “on”) performed better on the task, suggesting a link to children’s spatial vocabulary. The results demonstrate an advantage of geometric shapes over realistic objects in facilitating young children’s performance on a match-to-sample spatial reasoning task.     

Processing of locatives “in,” “on,” and “under” by aphasic patients: An analysis of the regression hypothesis

The present study investigated the comprehension of aphasic subjects as to locative prepositions “in,” “on,” and “under.” Patients had to locate a movable object with reference to a stationary referential object in order to achieve the spatial relations requested under oral instructions. The influence of two types of contextual relations between the objects in each stimulus pair on the subjects' performances was examined. Spatial relations were biased by the conventional knowledge of the most normal relationship between the two elements in everyday life in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, perceptivomotor constraints constituted the contextual bias. Analyzing the patients' responses in the light of developmental strategies did not lend support to the regression hypothesis. Broca's aphasics were sensitive to the two contextual factors investigated; Wernickes' performances were affected only by the perceptivomotor contextual bias. The results are discussed with reference to earlier studies on the differential syntactical comprehension skills of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics in sentence-picture matching tasks and production tasks.