Informativeness in children’s event descriptions: effects of task, typicality and listener needs
Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Adults readily adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the informational needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. This dissertation explores children’s ability to tailor their speech to the informational needs of their listener by combining methodologies from developmental and adult psycholinguistic research. Children’s adjustments are investigated in the context of a reference resolution paradigm and a spontaneous description paradigm. ☐ In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of almost identical events to a passive confederate-listener who could either see or not see the referents. Results showed that adults provided disambiguating information that picked out the target event but children massively failed to do so. Furthermore, both children and adults were more likely to mention atypical than typical event components to disambiguate referents. Because of the contrastive nature of the task, the listener’s visual access had no effects on production. Experiment 2 was a more interactive version of Experiment 1 where participants played a guessing game with a “naïve” listener. In this context, children (and adults) became overall more informative. ☐ In Experiment 3, 5-year-old children and adults described typical and atypical instrument events to a silent listener who could either see or not see these events. Experiments 4 and 5 modified Experiment 3 by having participants describe the same events to a silent (Experiment 4) or interactive addressee (Experiment 5) with a specific goal. Results showed that, in spontaneous production, adults performed both typicality-based and particular adjustments to addressees’ visual perspective and communicative goals. Five-year-olds also made typicality-based adjustments but their ability to make adjustments to the needs of their particular listener was inconsistent. ☐ We conclude that children’s well-attested difficulty to tailor their speech to the informational needs of their listener can be, in part, attributed to limitations in their ability to decipher the communicative goal of an exchange, unless provided with detailed cues (e.g., relatively restricted set of contrastive linguistic options, clearly stated listener goal) by an interactive interlocutor with actual informational needs. The implications of these findings for the development of communicative competence are discussed.
Description
Keywords
Language, literature and linguistics, Psychology, Common ground, Event cognition, Informativeness, Instruments, Pragmatics, Reference