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Average proportion of time looking to talker-preferred objects during the baseline interval and noun interval for 5-year-old age group. The average proportion of time looking to the talker-preferred object was significantly greater than chance (0.50) during the baseline interval (p < 0.001). There was no effect of fluency during the noun interval (p = 0.180). Error bars depict standard errors. A single asterisk represents a significant difference from chance (p < 0.05).
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An eye-tracking methodology was used to explore adults’ and children’s use of two utterance-based cues to overcome referential uncertainty in real time. Participants were first introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then produced fluent (“Look! Look at the blicket.”) or disfluent (“Look! Look at thee, uh, bli...
Citations
... They notably impact hyperbolized styles, such as lack of controls, disarranged interlocutors' etiquette as opposite controls sprightly (Nilsen et al., 2016). In this study, students' spoken expressions are primarily influenced by their distinct knowledge alterations involving speech fluency cues through the referential expectations formation for words recencies, as if they still hesitate with disfluency dynamics in the unfolding utterances (Thacker, Chambers, & Graham, 2018). Its attribution corresponds with full lexical and semantic information which can lead to monosyllabic or bisyllabic words, as well as influence voice recognition on the phonological familiarity for voice recognition cruciality (Zarate et al., 2015). ...
This study assessed paralinguistic features in Indonesian university students' contextual interaction during storytelling. Data collection was recorded from respondents' two video-based storytelling performances, while a self-rated questionnaire was distributed to 235 respondents out of 481 undergraduate English education students using simple random sampling. Data analysis used a mixed-methods approach to qualify students' paralinguistic features using the eduistic linguistics annotator (ELAN) and to quantify the paralinguistic features using statistical analyses through the significance of .05. The findings revealed that the ELAN analyzed the contextual interaction among freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The students’ paralinguistic features corresponded with the lexical and semantic evidence, which approached the function of monosyllabic and bisyllabic words, nonverbal expressions, and interpretations. Bodily gesture quantitatively showed moderate category for 44.7% (t = 2.434; p = .016), articulation showed attributable category for 54.0% (t = 3.789; p = .000), facial expression showed moderate category for 61.7% (t = 2.472; p = .014), and voice loudness showed attributable category for 47.7% (t = 4.121; p = .000). Herein, positive and significant attribution were shown by these paralinguistic features towards students' contextual interactions in storytelling for 34.9% with the multiple regressions (F = 7.990, R² = .349, and p < .000). The paralinguistic features empirically address the multimodal communication modes to improve teaching and learning activities.
... The second goal was to investigate the extent to which contrastive inferences can be influenced by child listeners' in-the-moment beliefs about the communicative rationality of the speaker, or instead if these inferences are largely insensitive to this kind of situation-specific factor. Work on parallel topics, such as the effect of momentary disfluencies on referential processing, shows that children can flexibly adjust online processing in response to knowledge about the speaker's traits and/ or speaker behavior (Orena & White, 2015;Thacker et al., 2018aThacker et al., , 2018b. Given these findings, it is possible that children's contrastive inferences will also reflect a sensitivity to a speaker's unconventional use of language. ...
This study examined 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N = 120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a correspondingly typical or atypical way. Critical utterances contained size adjectives (e.g., “Look at the big duck”). With conventional speakers, gaze measures indicated that children rapidly used the adjective to differentiate members of a contrasting pair, indicating that even 4‐year‐olds derive contrastive inferences. With unconventional speakers, contrastive inferences were delayed in processing. The findings demonstrate that preschoolers adjust their use of pragmatic cues when presented with evidence disconfirming their default assumptions about a speaker.
... Intriguingly, listeners are sensitive to the patterning of filled pauses in speech and use these disfluencies to predict words or descriptions that would not be readily accessible to the talker (Arnold et al., 2003). Studies have shown that filled pauses lead listeners to rapidly anticipate reference to newly learned or difficult-to-name objects (Arnold et al., 2007;Heller et al., 2015;Morin-Lessard & Byers-Heinlein, 2019), objects with low-frequency names (Bosker et al., 2014), speaker-dispreferred objects (Thacker et al., 2018), or discourse-new objects (Arnold et al., 2003(Arnold et al., , 2004Arnold & Tanenhaus, 2011;Barr, 2001;Barr & Seyfeddinipur, 2010;Orena & White, 2015;Owens & Graham, 2016;Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2014). Although at first glance these patterns might be explained by a learned association between filled pauses and whether the name for an object is readily accessible, there is evidence that the effects involve more situationspecific factors. ...
... Although there is some evidence that language proficiency has an influence on the extent to which non-native listeners interpret disfluencies as informative cues (with greater proficiency leading to greater cue uptake: Watanabe et al., 2008), other work has shown no effect of this type (Morin-Lessard & Byers-Heinlein, 2019). Further, developmental studies have shown that even child listeners are capable of using disfluencies to guide referential interpretation (e.g., Kidd et al., 2011;Morin-Lessard & Byers-Heinlein, 2019;Orena & White, 2015;Owens & Graham, 2016;Thacker et al., 2018;Yoon et al., 2021). A key goal of the present study was to explore whether older adults demonstrate the kinds of real-time sensitivities to disfluency cues demonstrated in children and younger adults. ...
Past research suggests listeners treat disfluencies as informative cues during spoken language processing. For example, studies have shown that child and younger adult listeners use filled pauses to rapidly anticipate discourse-new objects. The present study explores whether older adults show a similar pattern, or if this ability is reduced in light of age-related declines in language and cognitive abilities. The study also examines whether the processing of disfluencies differs depending on the talker's age. Stereotyped ideas about older adults' speech could lead listeners to treat disfluencies as uninformative, similar to the way in which listeners react to disfluencies produced by non-native speakers or individuals with a cognitive disorder. Experiment 1 used eye tracking to capture younger and older listeners' real-time reactions to filled pauses produced by younger and older talkers. On critical trials, participants followed fluent or disfluent instructions referring to either discourse-given or discourse-new objects. Younger and older listeners treated filled pauses produced by both younger and older talkers as cues for reference to discourse-new objects despite holding stereotypes regarding older adults' speech. Experiment 2 further explored listeners' biased judgments of talkers' fluency, using auditory materials from Experiment 1. Speech produced by an older talker was rated as more disfluent and slower than a younger talker even though these features were matched across recordings. Together, the findings demonstrate (a) older listeners' effective use of disfluency cues in real-time processing and (b) that listeners treat both older and younger talkers' disfluencies as informative despite biased perceptions regarding older talkers' speech. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... Recordings of participants' eye movements showed that listeners already anticipated reference to unknown objects (increase in proportion of fixations to unknown objects) when hearing the filler uh in the disfluent condition (i.e., well before hearing the target). Other studies have since shown the same effect in children as young as 2 years of age (Kidd, White, & Aslin, 2011;Orena & White, 2015;Owens & Graham, 2016;Owens, Thacker, & Graham, 2018;Thacker, Chambers, & Graham, 2018a, 2018b. Adult listeners have also been shown to be able to predict other types of complex referents, such as discourse-new (Arnold, Fagnano, & Tanenhaus, 2003;Arnold, Tanenhaus, Altmann, & Fagnano, 2004;Barr & Seyfeddinipur, 2010), compound (Watanabe, Hirose, Den, & Minematsu, 2008), and low-frequency referents (Bosker, Quené, Sanders, & De Jong, 2014a) upon hearing a disfluent filler uh. ...
Disfluencies, like 'uh', have been shown to help listeners anticipate reference to low-frequency words. The associative account of this 'disfluency bias' proposes that listeners learn to associate disfluency with low-frequency referents based on prior exposure to non-arbitrary disfluency distributions (i.e., greater probability of low-frequency words after disfluencies). However, there is limited evidence for listeners actually tracking disfluency distributions online. The present experiments are the first to show that adult listeners, exposed to a typical or more atypical disfluency distribution (i.e., hearing a talker unexpectedly say uh before high-frequency words), flexibly adjust their predictive strategies to the disfluency distribution at hand (e.g., learn to predict high-frequency referents after disfluency). However, when listeners were presented with the same atypical disfluency distribution but produced by a non-native speaker, no adjustment was observed. This suggests pragmatic inferences can modulate distributional learning, revealing the flexibility of, and constraints on, distributional learning in incremental language comprehension.
Adults and children utilize social category information during incremental language processing. Gender is a particularly salient social category that is often marked both in speakers' voices and the visual world. However, it is unknown whether toddlers exploit gender cues to draw connections between language and other aspects of their environment. The current study investigates whether toddlers use gender cues available in voices and objects during real-time language processing. 22- to 24-month-old toddlers (N = 38) were tested in a looking-while-listening paradigm. On each trial, toddlers viewed two highly familiar objects designed to be prototypically masculine and feminine (via color and patterns) and heard either a male or female speaker label the target object. Lexical processing was facilitated when the vocal gender matched the gender of the target object. This work demonstrates that toddlers consider both object-feature information and inferred speaker gender (based on speaker' voice) during online language processing.
Speech disfluencies (e.g., “Point to thee um turtle”) can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.
Disfluencies, such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’, can cause adults to attribute uncertainty to speakers, but may also facilitate speech processing. To understand how these different functions affect children’s learning, we asked whether (dis)fluency affects children’s decision to select information from speakers (an explicit behavior) and their learning of specific words (an implicit behavior). In Experiment 1a, 31 3- to 4-year-olds heard two puppets provide fluent or disfluent descriptions of familiar objects. Each puppet then labeled a different novel object with the same novel word (again, fluently or disfluently). Children more frequently endorsed the object referred to by the fluent speaker. We replicated this finding with a separate group of 4-year-olds in Experiment 1b ( N = 31) and a modified design. In Experiment 2, 62 3- to 4-year-olds were trained on new words, produced following a disfluency or not, and were subsequently tested on their recognition of the words. Children were equally accurate for the two types of words. These results suggest that while children may prefer information from fluent speakers, they learn words equally well regardless of fluency, at least in some contexts.
