Spatial Language and the Embedded Listener Model in Parents' Input to Children.

ABSTRACT: Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an "embedded listener model," where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the listener's conceptual and linguistic knowledge. In this study, we ask whether parents' spatial descriptions incorporate an embedded listener model that reflects their children's understanding of spatial relations and spatial terms. Adults described the positions of targets in spatial arrays to their children or to the adult experimenter. Arrays were designed so that targets could not be identified unless spatial relationships within the array were encoded an

SUBMITTER: Ferrara K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4930431 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature