Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse.
conceptual development
discourse
language development
pragmatics
social cognition
Journal
Developmental science
ISSN: 1467-7687
Titre abrégé: Dev Sci
Pays: England
ID NLM: 9814574
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
05 2021
05 2021
Historique:
revised:
13
08
2020
received:
22
02
2020
accepted:
05
10
2020
pubmed:
17
10
2020
medline:
8
6
2021
entrez:
16
10
2020
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
In conversation, individual utterances are 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. In a tablet-based game, 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, only 4-year-olds 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 ages 2 and 5.
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e13049Informations de copyright
© 2020 The Authors. Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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