Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Manuel Bohn
  • Khuyen Nha Le
  • Benjamin Peloquin
  • Bahar Köymen
  • Michael C. Frank

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere13049
JournalDevelopmental Science
Volume24
Issue number3
Number of pages8
ISSN1363-755X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.05.2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

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

    Research areas

  • conceptual development, discourse, language development, pragmatics, social cognition
  • Psychology

DOI

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