TY - JOUR

T1 - Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

AU - Bohn, Manuel

AU - Le, Khuyen Nha

AU - Peloquin, Benjamin

AU - Köymen, Bahar

AU - Frank, Michael C.

N1 - Funding Information: We thank Megan Merrick and Sabina Zacco for their help with the data collection and all families for participating. Manuel Bohn received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska‐Curie grant agreement no. 749229. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Authors. Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

PY - 2021/5/1

Y1 - 2021/5/1

N2 - In conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history (common ground). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., “want to pick?” means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2- to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. In a tablet-based game, children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun “it” as referring to another member of the same category. In Study 2, only 4-year-olds interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between ages 2 and 5.

AB - In conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history (common ground). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., “want to pick?” means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2- to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. In a tablet-based game, children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun “it” as referring to another member of the same category. In Study 2, only 4-year-olds interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between ages 2 and 5.

KW - conceptual development

KW - discourse

KW - language development

KW - pragmatics

KW - social cognition

KW - Psychology

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85094214891&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1111/desc.13049

DO - 10.1111/desc.13049

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 33064923

AN - SCOPUS:85094214891

VL - 24

JO - Developmental Science

JF - Developmental Science

SN - 1363-755X

IS - 3

M1 - e13049

ER -