2018 Friday Poster 6540

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

What makes a house a home? Mechanisms of lexical alignment in preschoolers’ referential communication
Z. Hopkins, L. Lindsay, H. Branigan

Many objects have more than one name (e.g. cup vs mug). In adults the choice between two alternatives is sensitive to a partner’s previous usage, with speakers tending to converge on the same name for a particular object [1]. Such lexical alignment (or entrainment) is typical of adult conversations, and recent research has shown that in a highly structured picture-naming ‘snap’ task, even 3-4 year old children display lexical alignment [2]. However, the nature of the ’snap’ task promoted the possible influence of lexical priming mechanisms on children’s referential choices, and made it less likely that perspective-taking and social-affiliative mechanisms – which mediate alignment in adults [3] – would play any role. In the present study, we examined whether 3-4 year olds show lexical alignment in a less structured context involving a more demanding task. We also ask whether social- affiliative mechanisms influence alignment when affiliation goals are salient.

Participants (N=70) played a novel referential communication game – the “Moving House” game – with an experimenter. In the game, the participant and experimenter each moved items from a moving truck into different rooms of a house. Experimental items had two alternative names. Pre-tests established that children knew and understood both names, but had a strong preference for one alternative. The experimenter told the participant where to place items from the truck into their house (prime rounds); the participant and experimenter then switched roles, and the participant directed the experimenter where to place her items (different exemplars of the same category, e.g., a different cup; target rounds). During prime rounds, we manipulated the name that the experimenter used to name target items (preferred vs. dispreferred), and examined children’s likelihood of producing the dispreferred name for a different exemplar of the same category. Before the game, we also manipulated children’s affiliative motivation, by showing half the participants a video depicting third-party ostracism, and the other half a control video [4]. Children were more likely to use a dispreferred name (mug) if the experimenter had previously used a dispreferred name than a preferred alternative (cup; .33 vs. .12, p < .001). Their tendency to lexically align was not affected by having watched the ostracism vs. control video (.35 vs .31; p = .46).

Our findings show that 3-4 year old children spontaneously lexically align with a conversational partner, even when this means using a normally dispreferred name.

Importantly, such alignment is not restricted to simple and highly structured tasks where referential communication is not necessary for task success: in the Moving House task, children had to determine the correct location for each object, and communicate both the identity of the relevant object and its location to the experimenter. Moreover, their alignment occurred over a substantial number of intervening turns and associated time delay. Our results are compatible with lexical priming mechanisms, but the durability of alignment effects – in the presence of greater task demands – also suggests the possibility of perspective-taking. However, we found no evidence that children imitate their partner’s language in order to affiliate with them.

References

  1. Brennan, S E, & Clark, H.H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22: 1482–93.
  2. Lindsay, , Hopkins, Z., Branigan, H. P., (in prep). A rabbit by any other name: Lexical alignment in preschoolers’ dialogue.
  3. Branigan, H.P., Pickering, M.J., Pearson, J., McLean, J.F., & Brown, A. (2011). The role of beliefs in lexical alignment: Evidence from dialogs with humans and computers. Cognition, 121: 41–57.
  4. Over, , & Carpenter, M. (2009). Priming third-party ostracism increases affiliative imitation in children. Developmental Science 12 (3): F1-8.