Modeling Individual Differences in Children’s Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Manuel Bohn
  • Louisa S. Schmidt
  • Cornelia Schulze
  • Michael C. Frank
  • Michael Henry Tessler
Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children – on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level. We address this question in children (N = 60, 3- to 5-year-olds), taking advantage of recent work on pragmatic cue integration. In Part 1, we use data from four independent tasks to estimate child-specific sensitivity parameters to three information sources: semantic knowledge, expectations about speaker informativeness, and sensitivity to common ground. In Part 2, we use these parameters to generate participant-specific trial-by-trial predictions for a new task that jointly manipulated all three information sources. The model accurately predicted children’s behavior in the majority of trials. This work advances a substantive theory of individual differences in which the primary locus of developmental variation is sensitivity to individual information sources.
Original languageEnglish
JournalOpen Mind
Volume6
Pages (from-to)311–326
Number of pages16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16.12.2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Research areas

  • Psychology - pragmatics, language development, individual differences, cognitive modeling

DOI