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 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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/

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85147024572&partnerID=8YFLogxK

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 -