Journal article
What's New to You? Preschoolers' Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency
Frontiers in psychology, Vol.11, pp.612601-612601
01/08/2021
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612601
PMCID: PMC7820764
PMID: 33488480
Abstract
Speech disfluencies (e.g., "Point to thee um turtle") can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner's disfluency based on their estimate of that partner's knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children's eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naive experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child's partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker's perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naive, and depended on each speaker's entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners' knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- What's New to You? Preschoolers' Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency
- Creators
- Si On Yoon - University of IowaKyong-sun Jin - Sungshin Women's UniversitySarah Brown-Schmidt - Vanderbilt UniversityCynthia L. Fisher - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Frontiers in psychology, Vol.11, pp.612601-612601
- DOI
- 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612601
- PMID
- 33488480
- PMCID
- PMC7820764
- NLM abbreviation
- Front Psychol
- ISSN
- 1664-1078
- eISSN
- 1664-1078
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media Sa
- Number of pages
- 17
- Grant note
- Old Gold Fellowship at the University of Iowa R01HD054448 / NIH; United States Department of Health & Human Services; National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/08/2021
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Record Identifier
- 9984258746302771
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