Parents and toddlers distinguish joke, pretend and literal intentional contexts through communicative and referential cues

Elena Hoicka

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2015.10.010

Abstract

Parents exaggerate communicative cues (Infant-Directed Speech, IDS; smiling; gaze to children) when pretending or joking, but it is not clear why. Additionally, referential cues (gaze, point to objects) remain unexamined in these contexts. Across Action (N=25; 16–20 months) and Verbal (N=43; 20–24 months) studies, parents pretended, joked, and interacted literally with toddlers. Examined was whether parents use the above cues to express positive emotion, grab attention, or for pedagogical purposes. Parents exaggerated IDS, and sometimes smiling, when joking or pretending to express positive emotion. For younger toddlers, parents increased gaze to toddlers and smiling when joking compared to pretend and literal contexts, feasibly to grab attention to scaffold joke understanding. Parents decreased gaze to objects when joking, plausibly to avoid toddlers generalizing jokes’ false information, following pedagogy theory. Younger toddlers responded appropriately to parents’ cues, highlighting how toddlers could distinguish intentions to joke from other acts. Parents and toddlers treated pretending as literal. In the older group, parents and toddlers did not distinguish contexts, perhaps because older toddlers rely on sophisticated cues, e.g., language, over the low-level cues measured.

Highlights

Understanding the non-literal world, such as pretending and joking, is an essential part of development
While toddlers engage in joking from the first year (Addyman and Addyman, 2013; Hoicka and Akhtar, 2012; Mireault et al, 2012), and pretending in the second year (Bosco et al, 2006; Jackowitz and Watson, 1980), it may be difficult for them to determine which of these two non-literal intentions others are expressing
Parents may have exaggerated communicative cues when joking or pretending versus acting literally because the control situations were serious, or at minimum less playful (Hoicka and Gattis, 2012; Lillard et al, 2007; Mireault et al, 2012; Reissland and Snow, 1996). If these cues are about positive emotion, we would expect parents to use these cues to a greater extent when playing literally, pretending or joking, compared to interacting in a serious way with their child

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the non-literal world, such as pretending and joking, is an essential part of development. Parents exaggerate features of IDS, including increased pitch and pitch variation, when joking and pretending versus speaking or acting literally (Hoicka and Gattis, 2012; Lillard et al, 2007; Reissland and Snow, 1996) Parents gaze to their toddler more when pretending, and sometimes smile more (Lillard et al, 2007). Parents may have exaggerated communicative cues when joking or pretending versus acting literally because the control situations were serious, or at minimum less playful (Hoicka and Gattis, 2012; Lillard et al, 2007; Mireault et al, 2012; Reissland and Snow, 1996) If these cues are about positive emotion, we would expect parents to use these cues to a greater extent when playing literally (such as playing with a toy car as a toy car), pretending or joking, compared to interacting in a serious way with their child. Infants better attend to and resolve difficult problems, such as discovering word boundaries and parsing sentences, when spoken in IDS versus ADS (Thiessen et al, 2005)

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Conclusion