Bohn Manuel, Schmidt Louisa S, Schulze Cornelia, Frank Michael C, Tessler Michael Henry
Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
Open Mind (Camb). 2022 Dec 16;6:311-326. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00069. eCollection 2022.
Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children - on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level. We address this question in children ( = 60, 3- to 5-year-olds), taking advantage of recent work on pragmatic cue integration. In Part 1, we use data from four independent tasks to estimate child-specific sensitivity parameters to three information sources: semantic knowledge, expectations about speaker informativeness, and sensitivity to common ground. In Part 2, we use these parameters to generate participant-specific trial-by-trial predictions for a new task that jointly manipulated all three information sources. The model accurately predicted children's behavior in the majority of trials. This work advances a substantive theory of individual differences in which the primary locus of developmental variation is sensitivity to individual information sources.
语用学是语言使用和学习的基础。计算认知模型已成功用于预测成人和儿童在总体层面上的语用现象。目前尚不清楚它们是否可用于预测个体层面的行为。我们利用最近关于语用线索整合的研究，对60名3至5岁的儿童进行了研究，以解决这个问题。在第一部分中，我们使用来自四个独立任务的数据来估计儿童对三种信息源的特定敏感性参数：语义知识、对说话者信息量的期望以及对共同基础的敏感性。在第二部分中，我们使用这些参数为一个新任务生成特定于参与者的逐次试验预测，该任务同时操纵了所有三种信息源。该模型在大多数试验中准确预测了儿童的行为。这项工作推进了一种关于个体差异的实质性理论，其中发展变化的主要场所是对个体信息源的敏感性。
