The object of my desire: Five-year-olds rapidly reason about a speaker’s desire during referential communication

Valerie San Juan,Craig G Chambers,Jared Berman,Chelsea Humphry,Susan A Graham

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2017.05.003

Valerie San Juan, Craig G Chambers + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.05.003

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Abstract

Two experiments examined whether 5-year-olds draw inferences about desire outcomes that constrain their online interpretation of an utterance. Children were informed of a speaker’s positive (Experiment 1) or negative (Experiment 2) desire to receive a specific toy as a gift before hearing a referentially ambiguous statement (“That’s my present”) spoken with either a happy or sad voice. After hearing the speaker express a positive desire, children (N=24) showed an implicit (i.e., eye gaze) and explicit ability to predict reference to the desired object when the speaker sounded happy, but they showed only implicit consideration of the alternate object when the speaker sounded sad. After hearing the speaker express a negative desire, children (N=24) used only happy prosodic cues to predict the intended referent of the statement. Taken together, the findings indicate that the efficiency with which 5-year-olds integrate desire reasoning with language processing depends on the emotional valence of the speaker’s voice but not on the type of desire representations (i.e., positive vs. negative) that children must reason about online.

Highlights

By virtue of being internally generated, mental states such as desires and beliefs are not always externally accessible
The findings indicate that the efficiency with which 5-year-olds integrate desire reasoning with language processing depends on the emotional valence of the speaker’s voice but not on the type of desire representations that children must reason about online
We examined the use of desire reasoning in communication by focusing on a type of perspective representation that is contingent on knowledge of a speaker’s desire, namely the ability to infer whether a speaker’s desire has been realized

Summary

Introduction

By virtue of being internally generated, mental states such as desires and beliefs are not always externally accessible. We examined how children’s perception of a person’s emotional reactions can be used to guide the process of desire reasoning. Two fundamental aspects of desire reasoning were assessed. We asked whether 5-year-olds can generate desire inferences rapidly enough to influence real-time social responses. We evaluated whether children’s ability to rapidly integrate desire reasoning with spoken communication varies with the complexity of desire representations. To examine these issues, we used a visual world methodology to examine children’s ability to draw inferences about a speaker’s desire fulfillment to constrain their online interpretation of an ambiguous spoken utterance

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