Developmental linguistics

Speaker: Laura Lindsay

Title: The development of turn-taking: Pre-schoolers may predict what you will say, but they don’t use those predictions to plan a reply

Abstract: Whereas adult conversations involve a rapid and smooth exchange of turns, children’s turn-taking skills are slow to develop. To explain timely turn taking it has been argued that adult listeners must both predict when the current turn will end and prepare their responses as soon as possible. In this study, we ask how these two abilities (prediction and early preparation) develop between the ages of 3 and 5. Adults and preschoolers played an iPad-based maze game, and interacted with a cartoon character who asked them yes/no questions. Analysis of answer latencies across two experiments suggests that while neither children nor adults make use of fine-grained predictions about the duration of a turn, adults can use predictions about the content of the turn to prepare their answer well in advance of turn end. Preschoolers, however, appear to begin preparing their answer only towards the end of the turn. We conclude that the major developmental hurdle in turn-taking does not lie in any difficulty making predictions or an inability to prepare a response, but rather learning to combine these two skills, using predictions about a sentence’s meaning to begin preparing an appropriate response. We discuss possibilities for why this may be the case.

Contact

Dr Barbora Skarabela