Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Some thoughts on Nordmeyer & Frank 2018

This is exactly the kind of behavioral work that serves as a good target of developmental modeling. (Thanks, N&F2018!) Moreover, the particular experiment lends itself very naturally to RSA modeling, given the importance of context manipulation (and then the RSA model allows us to be more concrete about what those contextual variables could be and what exactly they could do). 

More generally, this work also falls in a larger body of work that underscores the importance of pragmatic felicity when doing child language experiments. This was the basis for the Truth Value Judgment paradigm (Crain & Thornton 1998) -- it’s important to give supportive contexts if you want kids to show you their linguistic knowledge. They’re not as good as adults at “test-taking” -- i.e., compensating for a lack of supportive context by implicitly supplying their own. So, if kids aren’t behaving like they have adult-like linguistic knowledge, check if pragmatic (or processing) factors might be getting in the way.

Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). The truth value judgment task: Fundamentals of design. University of Maryland working papers in linguistics, 6, 61-70.

Some other thoughts:

(1) The Kim (1985) child behavioral setup, which involved (for example) someone pointing at an apple and saying “This is not a banana”. The child would reply “wrong!”, but of course we don’t know why she’s saying it’s wrong. Is it the wrong meaning (semantic issue) or the wrong thing to say (pragmatic issue)? This reminds me of recent work on children’s (non-)endorsements when it comes to quantifier scope ambiguity (Viau & Lidz 2010, Savinelli et al. 2017). The key idea is that they weren’t saying no because they couldn’t get the interpretation; they were saying no because it wasn’t a very informative interpretation, given the prior context. This also seems to be a main factor in English children’s pronoun interpretation behavior being wonky (Conroy et al. 2009). Also similar to the Conroy et al. (2009) study is how N&F2018 are explicitly manipulating the context to show a replication of prior behavior and then how to fix it with supportive pragmatic context.

Savinelli, K. J., Scontras, G., & Pearl, L. (2017). Modeling scope ambiguity resolution as pragmatic inference: Formalizing differences in child and adult behavior. In CogSci.

Viau, J., Lidz, J., & Musolino, J. (2010). Priming of abstract logical representations in 4-year-olds. Language Acquisition, 17(1-2), 26-50.

Conroy, A., Takahashi, E., Lidz, J., & Phillips, C. (2009). Equal treatment for all antecedents: How children succeed with Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry, 40(3), 446-486.

(2) Varying the linguistic form: “has no X” vs. “doesn’t have an X”. Corpus analysis could tell you how often negation of different types appear in these forms since “has no X” is less good than “doesn’t have an X”. Then we would know if that’s just a frequency effect or if something more interesting is happening.

(3) With adults, “has no X” is better when everyone else has an X. The pragmatic reason for this is that there’s a more informative utterance when the referent has a Y instead of an X (i.e., “has a Y”) -- this seems like something that could be captured in an RSA model’s cost function. Basically, it costs more to say “has no X” compared with “has Y” when both are true.

(4) In general, kudos for getting kids to give ratings. This is super-hard to do well, since it requires young children to think metalinguistically. I also really appreciate seeing the histogram of responses in Figure 4. Here, we can see that there are still quite a number of kids who, in the unsupportive none context (where no one else has anything) think that “Abby doesn’t have an apple” is fine (>50); however, many more kids (>100) think it’s terrible. Similarly, there are >50 kids who think “Abby doesn’t have an apple” is terrible in the target context (where everyone else has an apple), though many more (>100) think it’s fine. Hello, child data messiness -- and bless your hearts, child behavioral researchers.

I wish we could see an equivalent histogram for adults, though. I wonder how much of this messiness is because we’re dealing with kids vs. dealing with a felicity scale vs. dealing with a phenomenon that’s inherently messy in the target state.