Abstract:
Studies on production and comprehension have disclosed seemingly contradictory preferences in comprehenders and speakers. While speakers tend to make production choices that favour the inclusion of non-typical or otherwise informative content, typicality is favoured in comprehension (e.g. is associated with processing ease). However, recent work shows that comprehenders are aware of speakers' production preferences and take these into account when they anticipate upcoming content, and the more a speaker's role as an intentional communicator is highlighted, the more the comprehender comes to expect non-typical content from the speaker. In other words, the ability to reason about a speaker's informativity goals guides comprehenders' expectations. In contrast to adults, children's input may be characterised by less informative language (e.g. more mentions of typical events and properties), possibly leading children to expect speech to transparently reflect what the world is like. In this talk, I will present an ongoing study using sentence completion tasks to test whether children (aged 5-11) show informativity-driven reasoning about the speaker in a similar way to adults when making guesses about upcoming content.