Speaker-Specific Semantic Adaptation in Preschool-Aged Children

How flexible are children’s semantic representations? It is unknown whether they understand
that others may have semantic boundaries that are different from their own. Adults update their
expectations about how a speaker uses quantifiers after exposure to the speaker (Yildirim,
Degen, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, 2016). Here, we explore whether this ability is present in
preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, we show that preschoolers have adult-like
expectations about how a generic speaker would use the quantifiers some and many. They prefer
some for proportions less than 50% and many for proportions above 50%. In Experiment 2, forty
4 and 5-year-olds (mean = 4.6) were exposed to a speaker who was biased to either prefer using
some or many in a situation when describing a proportion of 50%. After exposure, participants
updated their expectations about the use of some and many, such that they aligned better with the
exposure speaker’s usage, suggesting that preschoolers are able to engage in semantic adaptation.
Experiment 3 replicates the results of Experiment 2 with sixty participants (mean = 4.8) while
reducing potential confounds. Experiment 4 investigates whether preschoolers can adapt to two
different speakers, one who is biased to use some and one who is biased to use many, at the same
time. We find that they do update their expectations about both speakers but that this is not a
long-lasting effect. Taken together, these results suggest that preschoolers engage in
speaker-specific adaptation and that they can use their prior exposure to a speaker’s utterances in
order to predict their future speech patterns, which demonstrates that children are attentive to
their conversational partners even at a very subtle level.