Do Young Children Use Verbal Disfluency as a Cue to Their Own Confidence?

ABSTRACT: Metacognitive reasoning is central to decision-making. For every decision, we can also judge our trust in that decision, or our level of confidence. The mechanisms and representations underlying reasoning about confidence remain debated. We test whether children rely on processing fluency to infer their own confidence: do decisions that come quickly and easily lead to high confidence, while decisions that are slow and effortful result in low confidence? Using children's verbal disfluency-fillers (e.g., "umm," "uhh"), hedges (e.g., "I think," "maybe"), and pauses in speech-as an observable index of processing fluency, we assess whether children's reports of confidence are a read-out of their verbal disfluency. Five-to-eight-year-olds answered semantic questions about animals and performed p

SUBMITTER: West E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11883146 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature