April 5, 2024 | 11:00AM
Social Science Research Building 302
Our first LEAP meeting of Spring Quarter will take place next Friday, 5 April at 11 am in Social Science Research Building 302 and on Zoom. Ben Morris (PhD Candidate, Psychology, UChicago) will be presenting.
Here are the talk details:
Title: Thinking “Um…” out loud: Children’s inferences from speech disfluencies
Abstract:
Conversation is profoundly structured by an expectation of timeliness. As a result, adults derive a range of inferences when a speaker pauses or produces disfluencies (e.g., “um”) in speech—inferring a speaker’s knowledge, willingness, and more. In this presentation, I will discuss 3 studies (total n = 305) exploring when and how children ages 4-9 use disfluencies to infer a speaker’s knowledge and preferences. Our mental states leak out in all manner of cues during conversation, and across these studies, I hope to paint a picture of how children begin to make use of that information to become smooth conversationalists, and also to learn about their social worlds.