Pragmatic theories assume that during communicative exchanges humans strive to be optimally informative and spontaneously adjust their communicative signals to satisfy their addressee's inferred epistemic needs. For instance, when necessary, adults flexibly and appropriately modify their communicative gestures to provide their partner the relevant information she lacks about the situation. To investigate this ability in infants, we designed a cooperative task in which 18-month-olds were asked to point at the target object they wanted to receive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is no room for pragmatic expectations about communicative interactions in core cognition. Spelke takes the combinatorial power of the human language faculty to overcome the limits of core cognition. The question is: Why should the combinatorial power of the human language faculty support infants' pragmatic expectations not merely about speech, but also about nonverbal communicative interactions?
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent studies demonstrated neural systems in bilateral fronto-temporal brain areas in newborns specialized to extract linguistic structure from speech. We hypothesized that these mechanisms show additional sensitivity when identically structured different pseudowords are used communicatively in a turn-taking exchange by two speakers. In an fNIRS experiment newborns heard pseudowords sharing ABB repetition structure in three conditions: two voices turn-takingly exchanged different pseudowords (Communicative); the different pseudowords were produced by a (Single Speaker); two voices turn-takingly repeated identical pseudowords (Echoing).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGoal-directed social interactions (whether instrumental or communicative) involve co-dependent, partially predictable actions of interacting agents as social goals cannot be achieved by continuously exchanging the same, perfectly predictable, or completely random behaviors. We investigated whether 10-month-olds are sensitive to the co-dependence and degree of predictability in an interactive context where unfamiliar entities exchanged either perfectly predictable (identical), partially predictable (co-dependent), or non-predictable (random) signal sequences. We found that when-following the interactive exchanges-one of the entities turned in the direction of one of two lateral target objects, infants looked more at the indicated referent, but only in the partially predictable signals condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGreat apes are able to request objects from humans by pointing. It is unclear, however, whether this is an associated response to a certain set of cues (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
July 2019
Infants' sensitivity to contingent reactivity as an indicator of intentional agency has been demonstrated by numerous referential gaze-following studies. Here we propose that variability of signal sequences in a turn-taking exchange provides an informative cue for infants to recognize interactions that may involve communicative information transfer between agents. Our experiment demonstrates that based on the abstract structural cue of variability of exchanged signal sequences, 10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActa Psychol (Amst)
May 2019
Earlier studies suggest that word length is influenced by the linguistic context to be precise and concise at the same time. The present study investigates whether the referential-situational context can also have an effect on the expected length of words. To test this assumption a salient property of the situational context, that is, the frequency of the unfamiliar referents was varied.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPragmatic theories of communication assume that humans evolved a species-unique inferential capacity to express and recognize intentions via communicative actions. We show that 13-month-old non-verbal infants can interpret the turn-taking exchange of variable tone sequences between unfamiliar agents as indicative of communicative transfer of goal-relevant information from a knowledgeable to a naïve agent pursuing the goal. No such inference of information transfer was drawn by the infants, however, when a) the agents exchanged fully predictable identical signal sequences, which does not enable transmission of new information, or b) when no goal-relevant contextual change was observed that would motivate its communicative transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBoth human infants and nonhuman primates can recognize unfamiliar entities as instrumental agents ascribing to them goals and efficiency of goal-pursuit. This competence relies on movement cues indicating distal sensitivity to the environment and choice of efficient goal-approach. Although dogs' evolved sensitivity to social cues allow them to recognize humans as communicative agents, it remains unclear whether they have also evolved a basic concept of instrumental agency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo investigate whether dogs could recognize contingent reactivity as a marker of agents' interaction, we performed an experiment in which dogs were presented with third-party contingent events. In the perfect-contingency condition, dogs were shown an unfamiliar self-propelled agent (SPA) that performed actions corresponding to audio clips of verbal commands played by a computer. In the high-but-imperfect-contingency condition, the SPA responded to the verbal commands on only two thirds of the trials; in the low-contingency condition, the SPA responded to the commands on only one third of the trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfants start pointing systematically to objects or events around their first birthday. It has been proposed that infants point to an event in order to share their appreciation of it with others. In the current study, we tested another hypothesis, according to which infants' pointing could also serve as an epistemic request directed to the adult.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Comp Psychol
November 2015
Dogs have a unique capacity to follow human pointing, and thus it is often assumed that they can comprehend the referential meaning of such signals. However, it is still unclear whether dogs perceive human directional gestures as signals referring to a target object (indicating what to manipulate) or a spatial cue (indicating where to do something). In the present study, we investigated which of these alternative interpretations may explain dogs' responses to human pointing gestures in ostensive communicative and nonostensive cuing contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA stream of sensory information is organized into discrete temporal units through event segmentation. On the basis of several studies measuring participants' explicit decisions about event boundaries, some theorists suggest that this segmentation is induced by increased unpredictability. Since this approach cannot describe the segmentation of unfamiliar events, we assumed that event segmentation might be perceptually driven.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOstensive signals preceding referential cues are crucial in communication-based human knowledge acquisition processes. Since dogs are sensitive to both human ostensive and referential signals, here we investigate whether they also take into account the order of these signals and, in an object-choice task, respond to human pointing more readily when it is preceded by an ostensive cue indicating communicative intent. Adult pet dogs (n = 75) of different breeds were presented with different sequences of a three-step human action.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF