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Abbot-Smith, K. orcid.org/0000-0001-8623-0664, Schulze, C. orcid.org/0000-0001-9151-4792, Anagnostopoulou, N. et al. (2 more authors) (Submitted: 2021) How do three-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech. [Preprint - PsyArXiv] (Submitted)
Abstract
If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies “I have a cough”, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. Additionally, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3½- to 4-year-olds (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge via priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, find a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. We argue that real-world knowledge is a necessary (but not sufficient) for relevance inferencing.
Metadata
Item Type: | Preprint |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 The Author(s). This preprint is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Cognitive and Computational Psychology; Language, Communication and Culture; Linguistics; Psychology; Basic Behavioral and Social Science; Clinical Research; Behavioral and Social Science; Pediatric; Mental health |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 04 Feb 2025 13:02 |
Last Modified: | 04 Feb 2025 13:02 |
Status: | Submitted |
Identification Number: | 10.31234/osf.io/bgdxr |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:222870 |
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Filename: AbbotSmith Schulze Anagnostopoulou Zajaczkowska Matthews under review 3 yr rel inf.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0