The social-cognitive basis of infants’ reference to absent entities

Bohn, Manuel; Zimmermann, Luise; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.024

Cited by 26 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Subsequent inferences therefore incorporate both the conversational topic(s), DISCOURSE INFERENCES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD 5 but crucially also social information -the participants engaging in the conversation. Children keep track of their conversational partners from a very young age (Bohn, Zimmermann, Call, & Tomasello, 2018). Saylor and Ganea (2007) had 14 to 20 month old children play ball with two different experimenters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Bohn

Peloquin

et al. 2020

Developmental Science

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In conversation, speech is almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history ("common ground"). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2-to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. Children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3-and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun it as referring to another member of the same category. In study 2, 4-year-olds only interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between age 2 and 5.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Bohn

Peloquin

et al. 2020

Developmental Science

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“…Common ground information guides how infants produce non-verbal gestures and interpret ambiguous utterances (Bohn, Zimmermann, Call, & Tomasello, 2018;Saylor, Ganea, & Vázquez, 2011). For slightly older children, common ground -in the form of knowledge about discourse novelty, preferences, and even discourse expectations -also facilitates word learning (Akhtar, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 1996;Saylor, Sabbagh, Fortuna, & Troseth, 2009;Sullivan, Boucher, Kiefer, Williams, & Barner, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting pragmatic cue integration in adults’ and children’s inferences about novel word meanings

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Language is learned in complex social settings where listeners must reconstruct speakers’ intentend meanings from context. To navigate this challenge, children can use pragmatic reasoning to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. One important challenge for pragmatic reasoning is that it requires integrating multiple information sources. Here we study this integration process. We isolate two sources of pragmatic information and, using a probabilistic model of conversational reasoning, formalize both how they should be combined and how this process might develop. We use this model to generate quantitative predictions, which we test against new behavioral data from three- to five-year-old children (N = 243) and adults (N = 694). Results show close numerical alignment between model predictions and data. This work integrates distinct sets of findings regarding early language and suggests that pragmatic reasoning models can provide a quantitative framework for understanding developmental changes in language learning.

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“…At 12 months infants also reliably comprehend and produce pointing gestures to refer to not only present and but also absent entities. They begin to point at an object's empty location to request that object from an adult or to draw the adult's attention to it (Behne et al, 2012;Bohn et al, 2018;Gräfenhain et al, 2009;Liszkowski et al, 2009). This comprehension of non-verbal reference may serve as a steppingstone to understanding verbal reference to absent entities.…”

Section: Existing Developmental Accounts Of Verbal Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

Luchkina¹,

Xu²

2022

Psychological Review

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In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye-gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose that this remarkable advancement in word learning results from attaining a referential understanding of words -that words are linked to mental representations and used intentionally to communicate about realworld entities. We suggest that verbal reference is supported by co-developing conceptual, social, representational, and statistical learning capacities. We also propose that infants' recognition of this tri-directional link between words, referents, and mental representations is enabled by their experience participating in and observing socially contingent interactions.Understanding verbal reference signals a qualitative shift in infants' word learning. This shift enables infants to bootstrap word meanings from syntax and semantics, learn novel words and facts from non-ostensive communication, and make inferences about speakers' epistemic competence based on their language production. In this paper, we review empirical findings across multiple facets of infant cognition and propose a novel developmental theory of verbal reference. Finally, we suggest new directions of empirical research that may provide stronger and more direct evidence for our theory and contribute to our understanding of the development of verbal reference and language-mediated learning in infancy and beyond.

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The social-cognitive basis of infants’ reference to absent entities

Cited by 26 publications

References 31 publications

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Predicting pragmatic cue integration in adults’ and children’s inferences about novel word meanings

From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

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