Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation.

Children interpreted an utterance made by a protagonist with a false belief, such as, 'I would like the car in the garage.' Calculating the speaker's belief in conjunction with the literal meaning of the utterance would lead to the correct interpretation that the intended referent is the car on the track, given that the car in the garage swapped places with the one on the track. In Experiments 1 and 2, many children aged around 4 and 5 years wrongly indicated the car in the garage. In contrast, many correctly indicated the car on the track when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief because the utterance was, 'the car I put in the garage'. Six-year-olds found both kinds of utterance equally easy in Experiment 1, while 3-year-olds had equal difficulty with both. In Experiments 2 and 3, the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance and many children aged between 3 and 6 years successfully used information about the speaker's belief to identify which of several candidate referents was intended. We discuss the results in relation to characteristics of utterance comprehension and consider implications for developments in understanding the mind by children beyond 4 years.     

When is a question not answered? The understanding of young children of utterances violating or conforming to the rules of conversational sequencing

Knowledge of the conventional rules of conversational sequencing enables a speaker or listener to evaluate the pragmatic use of an utterance. This study explored young children's ability to discriminate among utterances that violated or conformed to these rules (Experiment 1), and ability to explain rule violations (Experiment 2). In both experiments children were read short episodes containing utterances that conformed to the rules in that the utterances were used appropriately in the episodic context of utterance, or utterances that violated the conversational rules of contingency, relevance, or informativeness. In Experiment 1, kindergarten, and first- and second-grade children (5, 6, and 7 years of age) were asked to discriminate among the conforming and rule violating utterances by assigning each utterance to one of two female conventional and unconventional speakers. The results showed that the first and second graders, but not the kindergarten children, generally discriminated among the utterances. In Experiment 2, first and third graders (6 and 8 years of age) were asked to explain the rule violations. The results showed that only the third graders consistently generated correct explanations. These results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent in deliberately violating a rule by 6 or 7 years of age, but do not correctly infer that intent until they are 8 or 9 years old.     

小学儿童对虚假话语间接意义的理解

探讨了小学儿童对隐含在虚假话语中间接意义的理解特点。结果发现：（１）一年级儿童不能理解虚假话语的非字面意义,三年级儿童才基本上能够理解。（２）小学低年级儿童不能理解虚假话语的间接意义的主要原因是他们不能根据话语与事实不符和说话者知道事实真相来判断说话者说虚假话语的有意性和推论隐含的意义。部分原因可能在于他们没有意识到说话者了解事实真相,因而不知道说话者是故意使用虚假话语的。     

Categorization and communication in the face of prejudice: when describing perceptions changes what is perceived

In the face of prejudice against an ingroup, common ground for communication exists when people use similar social categories to understand the situation. Three studies tested the hypothesis that describing perceptions of prejudice can fundamentally change those perceptions because communicators account for the common ground in line with conversational norms. When women (Study 1), African Americans (Study 2), and Americans (Study 3) simply thought about suspected prejudice against their ingroup, categorization guided their perceptions: Participants assimilated their views of the prejudiced event toward the perceptions of ingroup members but contrasted away from the perceptions of outgroup members. Conversely, when participants described their perceptions, they contrasted away from the given category information and actually arrived at the opposite perceptions as those who merely thought about the prejudiced event. Study 3 identified an important qualification of these effects by showing that they were obtained only when participants could assume their audience was familiar with the common ground. Implications are discussed for understanding the role of communication in facilitating and inhibiting collective action about prejudice.     

The development of cynicism

Two experiments explored the development of cynicism by examining how children evaluate other people who make claims consistent or inconsistent with their self-interests. In Experiment 1, kindergartners, second graders, and fourth graders heard stories with ambiguous conclusions in which characters made statements that were aligned either with or against self-interest. Older children took into account the self-interests of characters in determining how much to believe them: They discounted statements aligned with self-interest, whereas they accepted statements going against self-interest. Experiment 2 examined children's endorsement of three different explanations for potentially self-interested statements: lies, biases, and mistakes. Like adults, sixth graders endorsed lies and bias as plausible explanations for wrong statements aligned with self-interest; younger children did not endorse bias. Implications for the development of cynicism and children's understanding of bias are discussed.     

Preschoolers' perspective taking in word learning: do they blindly follow eye gaze?

When learning new words, do children use a speaker's eye gaze because it reveals referential intent? We conducted two experiments that addressed this question. In Experiment 1, the experimenter left while two novel objects were placed where the child could see both, but the experimenter would be able to see only one. The experimenter returned, looked directly at the mutually visible object, and said either, "There's the [novel word]!" or "Where's the [novel word]?" Two- through 4-year-olds selected the target of the speaker's gaze more often on there trials than on where trials, although only the older children identified the referent correctly at above-chance levels on trials of both types. In Experiment 2, the experimenter placed a novel object where only the child could see it and left while the second object was similarly hidden. When she returned and asked, "Where's the [novel word]?" 2- through 4-year-olds chose the second object at above-chance levels. Preschoolers do not blindly follow gaze, but consider the linguistic and pragmatic context when learning a new word.     

Influence of perspective and goals on reference production in conversation

We examined the extent to which speakers take into consideration the addressee's perspective in language production. Previous research on this process had revealed clear deficits (Horton & Keysar, Cognition 59:91-117, 1996; Wardlow Lane & Ferreira, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 34:1466-1481, 2008). Here, we evaluated a new hypothesis--that the relevance of the addressee's perspective depends on the speaker's goals. In two experiments, Korean speakers described a target object in situations in which the perspective status of a competitor object (e.g., a large plate when describing a smaller plate) was manipulated. In Experiment 1, we examined whether speakers would use scalar-modified expressions even when the competitor was hidden from the addressee. The results demonstrated that information from both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives influenced production. In Experiment 2, we examined whether utterance goals modulate this process. The results indicated that when a speaker makes a request, the addressee's perspective has a stronger influence than it does when the speaker informs the addressee. These results suggest that privileged knowledge does shape language use, but crucially, that the degree to which the addressee's perspective is considered is shaped by the relevance of the addressee's perspective to the utterance goals.     

The role of inferences about referential intent in word learning: evidence from autism

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the present studies, children with autism were impaired in monitoring referential intent, but were equally successful as normally developing 24-month-old toddlers at mapping novel words to unnamed items under conditions of referential ambiguity. Therefore, constraints that lead the child to map a novel label to a previously unnamed object under these circumstances are not solely based on assessments of speakers' intentions.     

Disambiguation by community membership

To interpret utterances in conversations, listeners must often make reference to the common ground they share with speakers. For example, when faced with an utterance such as "That game was a disaster," listeners must decide whether they share common assumptions about what outcome would be disastrous. In our experiments, we examine how common ground, as encoded in community membership, is used to constrain judgments about the interpretations of ambiguous utterances. In Experiment 1, subjects were sensitive to community membership when they were asked to evaluate the interpretations at a leisurely pace. Experiment 2 replicated this result with greater time pressure. Experiment 3 demonstrated that judgments based on assessments of community membership were equivalent to those based on certain knowledge, except when the judgements were challenged. The results suggest that models of memory retrieval during language comprehension should make mention of access to common ground.     

Children's ability to infer utterance veracity from speaker informedness

Children between the ages of 3 years 7 months and 6 years 5 months experienced a contradiction between what they knew or guessed to be inside a box and what they were told by an adult. The authors investigated whether children believed what they were told by asking them to make a final judgment about the box's content. Children tended to believe utterances from speakers who were better informed than they themselves were and to disbelieve those from less well-informed speakers, with no age-related differences. This behavior implies an understanding of the speaker's knowledge and suggests that children can learn from oral input while being appropriately skeptical of its truth. Children also gave explicit knowledge judgments on trials on which no utterances were given. Performance on knowledge trials was less accurate than, and unrelated to, performance on utterance trials. Research on children's developing explicit theory of mind needs to be broadened to include behavioral indexes of understanding the mind.     

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.     

What constrains children's learning of novel shape terms?

In this study, 3-year-olds matched on vocabulary score were taught three new shape terms by one of three types of linguistic contrast: corrective, semantic, or referential. A 5-week training paradigm implemented four training sessions and four assessment sessions. Corrective contrast ("This is concave, it is not square," where square is the child's label for the target) produced more learning than did either semantic or referential contrast. In addition, regardless of group, more was learned about those targets that were classified more variably at pretest. Avoidance of lexical overlap (i.e., using more than one term for the same dimension) might make it more difficult for children to learn new dimensional adjectives, and a "shape bias" might make learning shape terms easier. However, children's expectations about the speaker's communicative intent interacted with the potential benefits of contrast in the semantic condition, and children in that group learned no more than did controls.     

Memorial Monitoring and Control: How Confidence and Social and Financial Consequences Affect Eyewitnesses' Reporting of Fine‐Grain Information

Research suggests that accessible coarse‐grain (i.e. general) information is sometimes under‐reported in memory accounts. In two experiments, socially motivating conditions were manipulated to determine whether, and under what contexts, coarse‐grain information is avoided because eyewitnesses are motivated to be specific and willing to risk accuracy. In Experiment 1, response privacy (private, public) and audience (high authority, low authority) were manipulated. Response privacy and penalty for inaccurate reporting (penalty, no penalty) were manipulated in Experiment 2. Across both experiments, eyewitnesses' confidence estimation (i.e. monitoring) was effective, suggesting that coarse‐grain information is under‐reported through poor decision making (i.e. control). Eyewitnesses avoided coarse‐grain information because they sometimes displayed a bias towards reporting fine‐grain information. This bias was more apparent, and coarse‐grain information avoiding more likely, when the perceived consequences for reporting were minimal (i.e. when in private in Experiment 1 and when no penalty for inaccuracy was imposed in Experiment 2). Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of right hemisphere damage on the pragmatic interpretation of conversational remarks

The ability to interpret conversational utterances was assessed in a group of 12 male patients with unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) and 12 non-brain-damaged, age-matched male control subjects. Subjects listened to short vignettes which described both the affective tone of the relationship between a speaker and an actor, and the actor's performance on a task. Each vignette concluded with the speaker characterizing the actor's performance. In half of the items, the speaker's utterance was literally true; in the other half, the utterance was literally false and invited a nonliteral interpretation. Results showed no appreciable differences in the performance of control subjects and RHD patients when interpreting literally true utterances. In contrast, the two groups differed reliably when interpreting the pragmatic intent of nonliteral utterances: Control subjects used information about both the actor's performance and the speaker-actor relationship, while RHD patients demonstrated difficulty in using the information about the speaker-actor relationship. Results have implications for patients' understanding of essential elements of conversations, such as characters' internal states and their intentions in employing different forms of literal and nonliteral language.     

参照性交流中的“听者设计”

“听者设计”一直是参照性交流研究领域中的热点。参照性交流过程中交流者通常会根据对交流同伴共享信息的评估来调整自己的行为,但是这些调整什么时候以及怎样发生的机制问题仍然存在争论。重点评述了“听者设计”的已有研究角度和研究进展,并归纳总结了参照惯例视角、记忆和注意视角、交流情境视角的研究观点。未来研究应扩展已有研究设计,以深入探查“听者设计”的形成、获得、发展变化过程,以及其与参照性交流其他限制因素间的相互作用;需要结合行为证据和眼动、脑成像证据等以帮助揭示“听者设计”过程的行为特点与认知机制。     

Davidson on First-Person Authority

Davidson's explanation of first-person authority in utterance of sentences of the form 'I V that p ' derives first-person authority from the requirements of interpretation of speech. His account is committed to the view that utterance sentences are truth-bearers, that believing that p is a matter of holding true an utterance sentence, and that a speaker's knowledge of what he means gives him knowledge of what belief he expresses by his utterance. These claims are here faulted. His explanation of first-person authority by reference to the requirements of interpretability is committed to the view that all understanding involves interpretation. This is argued to be a misconception of understanding and of speaker's meaning. Davidson's account involves acceptance of the cognitive assumption that normally when a person V s that p , he knows that he does. This assumption is challenged. Throughout, Davidson's conception is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein's.     

Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: for the speaker or for the addressee?

Evidence has been mixed on whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities. And when speakers do produce such cues, it is unclear whether they do so "for" their addressees (the audience design hypothesis) or "for" themselves, as a by-product of planning and articulating utterances. Three experiments addressed these issues. In Experiments 1 and 3, speakers followed pictorial guides to spontaneously instruct addressees to move objects. Critical instructions (e.g., "Put the dog in the basket on the star") were syntactically ambiguous, and the referential situation supported either one or both interpretations. Speakers reliably produced disambiguating cues to syntactic ambiguity whether the situation was ambiguous or not. However, Experiment 2 suggested that most speakers were not yet aware of whether the situation was ambiguous by the time they began to speak, and so adapting to addressees' particular needs may not have been feasible in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 examined individual speakers' awareness of situational ambiguity and the extent to which they signaled structure, with or without addressees present. Speakers tended to produce prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries regardless of their addressees' needs in particular situations. Such cues did prove helpful to addressees, who correctly interpreted speakers' instructions virtually all the time. In fact, even when speakers produced syntactically ambiguous utterances in situations that supported both interpretations, eye-tracking data showed that 40% of the time addressees did not even consider the non-intended objects. We discuss the standards needed for a convincing test of the audience design hypothesis.     

Response latency as a predictor of the accuracy of children's reports

Researchers have explored various diagnostic cues to the accuracy of information provided by child eyewitnesses. Previous studies indicated that children's confidence in their reports predicts the relative accuracy of these reports, and that the confidence-accuracy relationship generally improves as children grow older. In this study, we examined the added contribution of response latency to the prediction of children's accuracy over and above that of confidence ratings. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2nd and 5th graders studied picture-event pairs and were tested using forced-choice, 2-alternative, or 5-alternative questions. In Experiment 3, children watched a slideshow depicting a story and were tested by 5-alternative questions about story details. The children indicated their confidence in each response, and response latency was measured. The results of all experiments suggested that children in both age groups relied on response latency as a cue for confidence, and this reliance contributed to the success with which they monitored the accuracy of their reports. When the test format was easy (Experiment 1), 2nd graders were as accurate as 5th graders in monitoring the accuracy of their answers, and the latency of their responses was no less predictive of accuracy. When the task was more difficult, age differences emerged. Nevertheless, in all experiments and for both age groups, response latency was found to have added value for predicting accuracy over and above that of confidence. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for predicting the accuracy of children's reports are discussed.     

Do children "DRM" like adults? False memory production in children

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was used to investigate developmental trends in accurate and false memory production. In Experiment 1, DRM lists adjusted to be more consistent with children's vocabulary were used with 2nd graders, 8th graders, and college students. Accurate and false recall and recognition increased with age, but semantic information appeared to be available to all age groups. Experiment 2 created a set of child-generated lists based on the free associations by a group of 3rd graders to critical items. The child-generated associates were different from those generated by adults; long and short versions of the child-generated lists were therefore presented to 2nd, 5th, and 8th graders and college students in Experiment 3. Second graders exhibited few false memories, whereas 5th graders were similar to adults in low-demand conditions and more similar to younger children in high-demand conditions. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental changes in automatic and effortful processing and the use of semantic networks.