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Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers' referential intentions.
Celeste Kidd1, Katherine S White, Richard N Aslin
1Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, USA. ckidd@bcs.rochester.edu
Developmental Science
|June 17, 2011
Summary
Children can use speech disfluencies, like "uh" and "um," to understand speaker intentions during language acquisition. This ability to interpret these speech patterns emerges around age two.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Language acquisition relies on inferring speaker intentions.
- Children utilize contextual and social cues for this inference.
- Speech disfluencies occur predictably, often before new or infrequent words.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if young children use speech disfluencies to infer speaker referential intentions.
- To examine the developmental emergence of this ability in early language learners.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking study was conducted with children aged 1;4 to 2;8.
- Participants' attention was monitored during comprehension tasks involving speech disfluencies.
- Distributional information of disfluencies was analyzed in relation to object labeling.
Main Results:
- Young children (2;4 to 2;8) reliably attend to speech disfluencies.
- Children use disfluencies for online comprehension to predict referents before object labeling.
- The ability to use disfluencies for intention inference emerges around age two.
Conclusions:
- Speech disfluencies serve as a cue for inferring speaker intention in young children.
- This ability is present early in lexical development, emerging around the second year of life.
- Findings contribute to understanding the complex mechanisms of early language comprehension.
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