Preschoolers' use of talker information in on-line comprehension.
A crucial part of language development is learning how various social and contextual language-external factors constrain an utterance's meaning. This learning process is poorly understood. Five experiments addressed one hundred thirty-one 3- to 5-year-old children's use of one such socially relevant information source: talker characteristics. Participants learned 2 characters' favorite colors; then, those characters asked participants to select colored shapes, as eye movements were tracked. Results suggest that by preschool, children use voice characteristics predictively to constrain a talker's domain of reference, visually fixating the talker's preferred color shapes. Indicating flexibility, children used talker information when the talker made a request for herself but not when she made a request for the other character. Children's ease at using voice characteristics and possible developmental changes are discussed.
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla,CA 92093-0515., USA. creel@cogsci.ucsd.edu
Sarah C
SC
Creel
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*