Article Dans Une Revue Language, Cognition and Neuroscience Année : 2025

The early ontogeny of expectations about communicative informativeness: from infants’ exemplar frequency tracking to preschoolers’ pragmatic inference

Résumé

This article investigates the early development of informativeness expectations in communication. We tested three-to five-year-olds (n = 73) and 18-month-olds (n = 96) in a label learning paradigm, pitting expectations of informativeness against the tracking of the frequency of possible referents. During a label-learning phase, a speaker uttered a novel label while pointing (Studies 1-2) or looking (Study 3) ambiguously toward two types of unfamiliar objects: one unique object and an array of several identical objects. Preschoolers paired the novel label with the unique object, an inference consistent with expectations of the speaker's informativeness. Conversely, infants paired the novel label with the object type found in several exemplars, a pattern consistent with disambiguating unfamiliar labels by linking them to more frequent possible referents. Additional conditions demonstrate that infants rely on the frequency of potential referents from the speaker's viewpoint rather than from their own egocentric viewpoint.

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hal-05343073 , version 1 (03-11-2025)

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Marie Aguirre, Mélanie Brun, Anne Reboul, Olivier Mascaro. The early ontogeny of expectations about communicative informativeness: from infants’ exemplar frequency tracking to preschoolers’ pragmatic inference. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2025, pp.1-18. ⟨10.1080/23273798.2025.2563859⟩. ⟨hal-05343073⟩
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