Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (N = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with some (N = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce some. Their production of some implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire some, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, some is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations

HebammER - Acceptance of male midwifes in Germany

For 35 years, men have been allowed to be midwives in Germany. However, currently, there are only six men known to be midwives in the country. It is to be expected that this number will increase with the academisation of the midwifery training. Therefore, this study investigates the current acceptance of male midwives in Germany. 513 participants filled out an online survey answering questions on whether they could imagine being taken care of by a male midwife during pregnancy and birth and whether they could imagine it for other people. The results indicate that participants could imagine prenatal classes by a male midwife but could less imagine that they would accompany them through birth. Furthermore, factors such as previous support of a male midwife and number of own children significantly influenced the acceptance ratings. Thus, this study provides a first glimpse into the acceptance of male midwives in Germany, an important topic that requires more in-depth research with potentially rising numbers of male midwives

Semantic consistency of actions and word learning

This study investigates the influence of semantic consistency of actions on word learning. Is it easier to learn a word for an object, if the object always moves in the same way? Or is it easier when the object moves in different ways

The relationship between toddlers’ preference for and learning from child- and adult-directed speech

How do internal and external factors such as preference and caregiver input affect word learning in 18- to 24-month-old children? We tested 48 18- to 24-month-old children in a gaze-contingent IDS/ADS preference task and a word-object association learning task. Additionally, we recorded mothers producing IDS and ADS. First, maternal input differed in its prosodic features between IDS and ADS. Second, children showed no systematic differences when choosing between the IDS and the ADS speaker. Third, children learned novel word-object associations from both IDS and ADS. Fourth, a generalised linear mixed model revealed that a child’s individual preference modulated word learning: Children showed higher target recognition in the register they preferred. We did not find any relationship between maternal input, children’s preference, or their word learning. Together, these results suggest that children between 18 and 24 months were influenced more by their own preferences than by external input in the current setting. Thus, the current study sheds light on how the input a child perceives and the preferences a child forms can influence a child's word learning behaviour early in life

I learn what I like: Children’s preferences but not maternal IDS influence word learning from IDS and ADS

The input a child receives as well as the child’s own preferences can influence their learning. While parents typically use exaggerated infant-directed speech with their child (IDS), children’s preference for IDS varies across development, and even older children learn better from IDS relative to ADS (Ma et al., 2011). Here, we examine whether maternal input and children’s preference for IDS relative to ADS influence their word learning from the two registers. We tested 48 18- to 24-month-olds in a gaze-contingent preference task measuring whether they prefer a woman talking IDS or a woman talking ADS. Subsequently, children were presented with novel objects and their novel labels, with half of the labels in IDS and the other in ADS. At test, two objects were presented side-by-side and one object was labelled while children’s target looking was recorded. Additionally, we recorded mothers’ IDS and ADS. While mothers’ IDS differed from ADS, children did not show a systematic preference for one of the registers. Children learned word-object associations from IDS and ADS, and they showed higher target recognition in the register they preferred. These results reveal how the preferences a child forms can influence a child's word learning behaviour early in life

Do preferences for words and actions influence word-object and action-object learning in early childhood?

Children live in a multimodal world: For example, communication with young children not only includes information from the auditory linguistic modality in the form of speech but also from the visual modality in the form of actions that caregivers use in the interaction with children. Dynamic systems approaches suggest that multimodal input can help children to learn from the environment while also allowing the child to shape their own learning experience through selective attention. This selective attention might be influenced by the child's preferences, which, in turn, might shape the child's learning behaviour. In this study, we investigated how children's selective attention to information from the linguistic or the action modality influence learning in both domains. Two- to 3-year-old children and adults participated in a novel gaze-contingent paradigm that allowed them to choose between being provided with the labels for or the actions that one can do with novel and familiar objects. At test, participants saw the two novel objects and either heard one of the labels or saw one of the actions that had been performed on one of the objects. Following label and action presentation, we investigated whether children fixated the target object, i.e., the object whose respective action/label had been presented, as an index of word and action learning. Children learned word but not action-object associations, and their target looking in the word-object condition was influenced by their selective attention to words in the earlier phase. Adults learned word-object associations and action-object associations, and their target looking in the action-object condition was influenced by their selective attention to actions in the earlier phase. Gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigms provide us a unique method to analyse children's active learning preferences, which will help us better understand children's learning behaviour in a complex world. In particular, we show that in multimodal environments, children's preferences might help to structure the complex input into chunks that are compatible with the child's cognitive capacities in the moment

Infants follow the gaze of same-age peers, young children, and adults

Gaze following – infants’ orienting towards an object attended to by their social partner – has been linked to a range of socio-cognitive skills. Despite considerable research on when infants follow the gaze of their social partners, studies have typically examined infants’ following of adults’ gaze. Therefore, little is known about whether or how gaze following is modulated by the characteristics of the model, such as their age. The current study examined infants’ following of the gaze of an actor that varied in age: an adult, a young child, and an infant. In an eyetracking study, 49 infants (age: 6 to 14 months) were presented with videos in which the actor (either an adult, a child or an infant) first looked down towards a neutral point on the table, then to the participant with a friendly facial expression, and then to one of two novel objects to the left and right of the table. Participants followed the gaze of the actor regardless of age, suggesting that gaze following is not constrained to interactions with an adult. Furthermore, participants showed high interest in the actors’ faces which was the strongest for the infant actor followed by the child actor, and the adult actor. Tthese results shed insight into the interaction between infants’ gaze following behaviour and their attentional preferences for different social partners. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of development: Beyond adults, other infants and children are also perceived as interesting social partners and, potentially, valuable sources of information