Thacker Justine M, Chambers Craig G, Graham Susan A
Owerko Centre and Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2018 Feb 13;9:143. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00143. eCollection 2018.
An eye-tracking methodology was used to explore adults' and children's use of two utterance-based cues to overcome referential uncertainty in real time. Participants were first introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then produced fluent ("") or disfluent ("") instructions referring to novel objects in a display containing both talker-preferred and talker-dispreferred colored items. Adults (Expt 1, = 24) directed a greater proportion of looks to talker-preferred objects during the initial portion of the utterance ("…"), reflecting the use of indexical cues for talker identity. However, they immediately reduced consideration of an object bearing the talker's preferred color when the talker was disfluent, suggesting they infer disfluency would be more likely as a talker describes dispreferred objects. Like adults, 5-year-olds (Expt 2, = 27) directed more attention to talker-preferred objects during the initial portion of the utterance. Children's initial predictions, however, were not modulated when disfluency was encountered. Together, these results demonstrate that adults, but not 5-year-olds, can act on information from two talker-produced cues within an utterance, talker preference, and speech disfluencies, to establish reference.
采用眼动追踪方法来探究成人和儿童如何实时利用两种基于话语的线索来克服指称不确定性。参与者首先被介绍给两个有不同颜色偏好的角色。然后，这些角色针对一个展示中的新物体给出流畅（“”）或不流畅（“”）的指示，展示中包含说话者偏好和不偏好的颜色物品。成人（实验1，n = 24）在话语的初始部分（“…”）将更大比例的目光投向说话者偏好的物体，这反映了他们利用指示性线索来确定说话者身份。然而，当说话者不流畅时，他们会立即减少对带有说话者偏好颜色物体的考虑，这表明他们推断当说话者描述不偏好的物体时更可能出现不流畅。与成人一样，5岁儿童（实验2，n = 27）在话语的初始部分也将更多注意力投向说话者偏好的物体。然而，当遇到不流畅时，儿童的初始预测并未受到调节。总之，这些结果表明，成人能够根据话语中说话者产生的两种线索——说话者偏好和言语不流畅——所提供的信息来建立指称，而5岁儿童则不能。
