Early Understanding of Pragmatic Principles in Children’s Judgments of Negative Sentences

Nordmeyer, Ann; Frank, Michael C.

doi:10.1080/15475441.2018.1463850

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These findings suggest that negative sentences are processed in a fully incremental manner as long as they are used in an appropriate pragmatic context, supporting the view that negation is inherently contextual (e.g., Glenberg, Robertson, Jansen, & Johnson-Glenberg, 1999) and that negatives are not necessarily any more difficult to process than affirmatives (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Tridgell, 1972;Wason 1965). Developmental research has identified similar patterns in young children: for example, negative sentences are more readily understood and accepted by 3-and 4-year-olds when presented in a pragmatically supportive context (Nordmeyer & Frank, 2018), although 2-year-olds appear to have more fundamental difficulties with semantic processing of truth-functional negation (Reuter, Feiman, & Snedeker, 2018).…”

Section: /67mentioning

confidence: 68%

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: /67mentioning

confidence: 68%

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…We hypothesized that participants would be more likely to reach this interpretation when it was sufficiently informative to discover the location of the reward. Thus, our experimental design capitalizes on previous results showing that adults and preschoolers are more likely to find a negative sentence acceptable when its additional processing costs (compared to an affirmative one) are compensated by its cognitive benefits in terms of informativeness (Nordmeyer & Frank, 2018).…”

Section: 3discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers’ Processing of Novel Communicative Cues

Aguirre,

Brun,

Morin

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive benefits. We tested this hypothesis in three studies in which toddlers (N = 90) searched for a reward hidden in one of several containers. In all studies, an adult communicated the reward's location with an unfamiliar and ambiguous cue. We manipulated the processing costs (operationalized as inferential chain length) and cognitive benefits (operationalized as informativeness) of the possible interpretations of the cues. Toddlers processing of novel communicative cues were guided by expectations of low processing costs (Study 1) and high cognitive benefits (Studies 2 and 3). More specifically, toddlers treated novel cues as if they were easy to process, informative, and accurate, even when provided with repeated evidence to the contrary. These results indicate that, from toddlerhood onward, expectations of cognitive utility shape the processing of novel communicative cues. These data also reveal that toddlers, who are in the process of learning the language and communicative conventions of people around them, exert a pressure favoring cognitive efficiency in communicative systems.

show abstract

“…In this paradigm, our linking hypothesis is that participants should be fastest to accept scenes when they depict worlds that the listener thinks the speaker is likely to be describing with the given utterance (i.e., worlds with high marginal posterior probability in the listener’s comprehension model). Somewhat more formally, we suppose that reaction time in this task is monotonically related to the surprisal (negative log probability) of a world given a sentence (following Nordmeyer and Frank ( 2014 )).…”

Section: Comprehension Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical Perspective-Taking in Comprehension and Production

Anderson

Dillon

2023

Open Mind

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language use in conversation requires conversation partners to consider each other’s points-of-view, or perspectives. A large body of work has explored how conversation partners take into account differences in knowledge states when choosing referring expressions. This paper explores how well findings from perspective-taking in reference generalize to a relatively understudied domain of perspective: the processing of grammatical perspectival expressions like the motion verbs come and go in English. We re-visit findings from perspective-taking in reference that conversation participants are subject to egocentric biases: they are biased towards their own perspectives. Drawing on theoretical proposals for grammatical perspective-taking and prior experimental studies of perspective-taking in reference, we compare two models of grammatical perspective-taking: a serial anchoring-and-adjustment model, and a simultaneous integration model. We test their differing predictions in a series of comprehension and production experiments using the perspectival motion verbs come and go as a case study. While our comprehension studies suggest that listeners reason simultaneously over multiple perspectives, as in the simultaneous integration model, our production findings are more mixed: we find support for only one of the simultaneous integration model’s two key predictions. More generally, our findings suggest a role for egocentric bias in production for grammatical perspective-taking as well as when choosing referring expressions.

show abstract

Early Understanding of Pragmatic Principles in Children’s Judgments of Negative Sentences

Cited by 12 publications

References 28 publications

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers’ Processing of Novel Communicative Cues

Grammatical Perspective-Taking in Comprehension and Production

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About