What's New to You? Preschoolers' Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency.

ABSTRACT: Speech disfluencies (e.g., "Point to thee um turtle") can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner's disfluency based on their estimate of that partner's knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children's eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experimen

SUBMITTER: Yoon SO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7820764 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature