Developmental linguistics

Speaker: Jess Brough

Title: Language production in children and adults

Abstract: Theories of sentence planning argue that speakers demonstrate a bias to mention the most animate entity first, because it is more significant in human thought and is therefore more conceptually accessibly than an inanimate entity. The current study proposed that a hierarchical ordering of entities from animate to less animate placing humans at the top should be extended to take into account group membership. It investigated if sharing aspects of identity with an ingroup member makes them more conceptually accessible and therefore more likely to be mentioned first in descriptions of scenes. 64 Black speakers (32 women) and 64 White speakers (32 women) described scenes in which they had to choose to describe one critical item before another using locative sentences. 3 conditions were used: animate, own-gender and own-race. Critical items either matched or did not match with an aspect of the speaker’s own identity. Results showed that speakers were more likely to mention a portrait matching their own race first and an inanimate object before a human face (contrary to animacy bias predictions). Own-gender did not have a significant effect. Discussion addresses group membership effects on incremental speech and the effects of colour-blind descriptions.

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Laura Lindsay