Effects of “We”-Framing and Prior Discourse on Young Children’s Referential Informativeness

Successful reference relies on being appropriately informative for listeners. What factors influence informativeness? For example, what factors influence the decision to refer to a ball with the less informative phrase it, as opposed to the more informative phrase the red ball? The present dissertation proposes and investigates a common ground hypothesis and a motivation hypothesis as candidate explanations of young children’s informativeness. Chapter 1 reviews some history of early research pertinent to these hypotheses. Chapters 2 and 3 provide extensive review of recent research pertinent to either hypothesis. Chapter 4 sketches a pragmatistic account of applied statistical inference for investigations of referential informativeness. This account eschews the pseudo-objectivity of traditional statistical practice in favor of a subjectivist Bayesian approach. Chapter 5 puts this way of thinking to work as a tool to compare the relative merits of the common ground and motivation hypotheses. A study is reported that investigated the effects of “we”-framing and prior discourse on 4-year-olds’ informativeness. Four-year-olds learned a novel game from an experimenter, E1. E1 framed the game as conventionally shared or idiosyncratically invented. Then, participants played the game with a new experimenter, E2. E2 framed their play with we”-framing or “you”-framing. Subsequently, participants’ informativeness was recorded when they referred to items in the game for E2. Surprisingly, participants were more informative following conventional compared to idiosyncratic discourse. Less reliably, but equally consistently, this same pattern attended “we”-framing, compared to “you”-framing. In addition, exploratory analyses suggested that participants more often taught E2 with normative language, rather than instrumental language, following idiosyncratic discourse when it was supplemented with “you”-framing. These results suggest that conventional discourse and “we”-framing stoke children’s cooperative motivations and, thereby, their informativeness.