Abstract
We investigated how preschoolers use their understanding of the actions available to a speaker to resolve referential ambiguity. In this study, 58 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with arrays of eight objects in a toy house and were instructed to retrieve various objects from the display. The trials varied in terms of whether the speaker’s hands were empty or full when she requested an object as well as whether the request was ambiguous (i.e., more than one potential referent) or unambiguous (i.e., only one potential referent). Results demonstrated that both 3- and 4-year-olds were sensitive to speaker action constraints and used this information to guide on-line processing (as indexed by eye gaze measures) and to make explicit referential decisions.
Highlights
Consider a situation in which a parent walking with a child in a parking lot exclaims ‘‘Car!’’ In this situation, the intended meaning of the utterance is ambiguous because there is insufficient linguistic information to identify which car, of the many cars present in the situation, is the intended referent
The exclusion criteria based on fixation patterns were applied to address the interpretive problem whereby children might appear to use speaker action constraints to isolate a particular referent when they were not aware that the display contained an alternative referent for the expression
If Experimenter 1 (E1)’s action constraints served as a domain restriction for the ambiguous instruction trials, latency to first touch would be shorter on the ambiguous hands-empty trials compared with the ambiguous hands-full trials
Summary
Consider a situation in which a parent walking with a child in a parking lot exclaims ‘‘Car!’’ In this situation, the intended meaning of the utterance is ambiguous because there is insufficient linguistic information to identify which car, of the many cars present in the situation, is the intended referent. One car is speeding through the parking lot, referential ambiguity is reduced as a result of the child’s ability to gauge the parent’s situation-specific intention (i.e., to direct attention to the approaching car and avoid danger). This example highlights the ambiguity inherent in language and the need for listeners to draw on information beyond the specific words in an utterance to clarify a speaker’s intentions. Collins et al / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 112 (2012) 389–402
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