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      Bilingual children weigh speaker’s referential cues and word-learning heuristics differently in different language contexts when interpreting a speaker’s intent

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          Abstract

          Past research has investigated how children use different sources of information such as social cues and word-learning heuristics to infer referential intents. The present research explored how children weigh and use some of these cues to make referential inferences. Specifically, we examined how switching between languages known (familiar) or unknown (unfamiliar) to a child would influence his or her choice of cue to interpret a novel label in a challenging disambiguation task, where a pointing cue was pitted against the mutual exclusivity (ME) principle. Forty-eight 3-and 4-years-old English–Mandarin bilingual children listened to a story told either in English only (No-Switch), English and Mandarin (Familiar-Switch), English and Japanese (Unfamiliar-Switch), or English and English-sounding nonsense sentences (Nonsense-Switch). They were then asked to select an object (from a pair of familiar and novel objects) after hearing a novel label paired with the speaker’s point at the familiar object, e.g., “Can you give me the blicket?” Results showed that children in the Familiar-Switch condition were more willing to relax ME to follow the speaker’s point to pick the familiar object than those in the Unfamiliar-Switch condition, who were more likely to pick the novel object. No significant differences were found between the other conditions. Further analyses revealed that children in the Unfamiliar-Switch condition looked at the speaker longer than children in the other conditions when the switch happened. Our findings suggest that children weigh speakers’ referential cues and word-learning heuristics differently in different language contexts while taking into account their communicative history with the speaker. There are important implications for general education and other learning efforts, such as designing learning games so that the history of credibility with the user is maintained and how learning may be best scaffolded in a helpful and trusting environment.

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          The relationship between cognition and action: performance of children 3 1/2-7 years old on a Stroop-like day-night test.

          One hundred and sixty children 3 1/2-7 years of age (10 M, 10 F at each 6-month interval) were tested on a task that requires inhibitory control of action plus learning and remembering two rules. They were asked to say "day" whenever a black card with the moon and stars appeared and to say "night" when shown a white card with a bright sun. Children < 5 years had great difficulty. They started out performing well, but could not sustain this over the course of the 16-trial session. Response latency decreased from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years. Children < 4 1/2 years performed well when they took very long to respond. To test whether the requirement to learn and remember two rules alone was sufficient to cause children difficulty, 80 children 3 1/2-5 years old were tested on a control version of the task ("say 'day' to one abstract design and 'night' to another"). Even the youngest children performed at a high level. We conclude that the requirement to learn and remember two rules is not in itself sufficient to account for the poor performance of the younger children in the experimental condition.
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            Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words.

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              Perceptual role taking and protodeclarative pointing in autism

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                10 June 2015
                2015
                : 6
                : 796
                Affiliations
                Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore Singapore
                Author notes

                Edited by: Sebastian Loth, Universität Bielefeld, Germany

                Reviewed By: David Sobel, Brown University, USA; Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University, Canada

                *Correspondence: W. Q. Yow, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, Singapore 487372, Singapore quin@ 123456sutd.edu.sg

                This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00796
                4461834
                89fc215e-848b-4b48-b1a7-6b12a7d03230
                Copyright © 2015 Hung, Patrycia and Yow.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 18 February 2015
                : 27 May 2015
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 4, Equations: 0, References: 45, Pages: 9, Words: 0
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                mutual exclusivity,bilingualism,code-switching,word-learning,communicative signals,pragmatic cues

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