COMINTENT · Information transmission in language: do infants perceive communicative intent?
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2012-03-01 → 2014-02-28
- EU contribution
- €226,548
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IIF
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Results in brief
Information transmission in language: do infants perceive communicative intent?
In this project, we explored when, and by what means, infants start perceiving the communicative role of verbal acts. We asked whether and under what conditions infants expect agents to share a language, and what inferences they draw if agents share such a communicative code. In the course of the project, we further broadened the scope investigations, asking how infants and adults learn about important carriers of communicative load in language, including words and their syntactic organization. We also investigated the low-level cues observers use to track and remember socially relevant actors. Since the beginning of the project, we addressed these questions in about 300 infants of different ages, and at least 700 adult participants. Further, we started developing a software package for the analysis of eye tracking data using the R programming language, and developed several computational models of aspects of language acquisition. As the fellow acquired data until the end of his stay at the host institution, the results below are still preliminary, being analyzed and most are not yet submitted to scientific journals. However, we estimate that the data and models acquired during the fellowship duration will lead to at least 10 peer reviewed papers, two of which will be submitted to Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, while the others will be submitted to top journals in the field. In addition, the results from this work have triggered further questions that will be addressed both at the host institution and at the fellow’s new laboratory at City University London.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
According to all treatments of human communication, humans do not only transmit information about facts, but also about their intention to transmit information. That is, when being addressed with a sentence, we do not only grasp the message carried by the sentence, but also that the speaker intended to address this message to us. While there is little doubt that adults understand the communicative intent of speakers, it is unclear whether this is also the case in infancy, or whether infants just understand that humans happen to be useful information sources, but not that speakers intend to transmit information. Here we start exploring whether and when young infants perceive linguistic utterances as intentional acts of communication from two directions. First, testing bilingual infants, we ask whether infants expect speakers and listeners to share a common code for successful communication. We first test whether bilingual infants know that they learn two distinct languages. Then, we ask whether they expect agents to share a language when they speak to each other; further we ask whether this expectation is specific to linguistic sounds, or whether any human-made sound would work as well, and whether familiarity with the speakers’ languages is required for this expectation to emerge. Second, we ask whether monolingual infants expect agents to produce utterances that are communicatively relevant to listeners. We explore whether they expect speakers to transmit information that is relevant to the listeners’ goals; further, we test whether infants perceive the speakers’ verbal behaviour as under the control of the speakers’ goals, or whether they expect speakers to reflexively “leak” relevant information. Taken together, these experiments are among the first to target the perception of speaker and listener intentions in verbal behaviour in young infants, exploring the emergence of a crucial facet of linguistic communication that might well be unique in the animal kingdom.""
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA · BarcelonaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union