TY - JOUR

T1 - Modeling Individual Differences in Children’s Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning

AU - Bohn, Manuel

AU - Schmidt, Louisa S.

AU - Schulze, Cornelia

AU - Frank, Michael C.

AU - Tessler, Michael Henry

N1 - 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.

PY - 2022/12/16

Y1 - 2022/12/16

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Psychology

KW - pragmatics

KW - language development

KW - individual differences

KW - cognitive modeling

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/e9ff3943-2ddc-3558-96cf-11b037d2834b/

U2 - 10.1162/opmi_a_00069

DO - 10.1162/opmi_a_00069

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 36993141

VL - 6

SP - 311

EP - 326

JO - Open Mind

JF - Open Mind

SN - 2470-2986

ER -