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

M. H. Tessler was funded by the National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Grant No. 1911790. M. C. Frank was supported by a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship and the Zhou Fund for Language and Cognition. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

    Research areas

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

DOI