This week's internal seminar features two talks from Melissa Reddy and Sara Morales Izquierdo. 12 pm on Wednesday.

Please join us (TEAMS links emailed by Jesse Preston).

Abstracts and link below.

Illusion of causality and unpredictable linguistic variation (Sara Morales-Izquierdo)

Natural languages contain variation. For example, different words are used to express similar meanings. However, this variation is seldom fully unpredictable. Cues such as the social, grammatical or syntactic context help us choose between the different possible variants. Indeed, languages tend to evolve to eliminate unpredictability. This has been observed in the development of creole languages or new sign languages, and also in the laboratory. When participants are taught an artificial miniature language that contains unpredictable elements, these tend to be reduced by learners and over generations. One of the mechanisms used to reduce unpredictability is conditioning. Through conditioning, participants associate different variants with different cues. However, the circumstances in which participants show this behaviour is not well understood. Do participants actually perceive a relationship between the cue and the variant? Literature in illusion of causality in non-linguistic domains show that skewing the frequency of appearance of two unrelated events affects the likelihood of people perceiving a causal relationship between them. In this talk, I will present be presenting a design that aims to test whether this can be generalised to unpredictable linguistic variation, by manipulating the frequency of different variants and cues and observing whether conditioning happens. I will also be presenting some preliminary pilot data.

Does Increased Coordination in Joint Action Increase Young Children’s Commitment or Decrease Their Need to Social Reference? (Melissa Reddy)

In adult studies, increased levels of interpersonal action coordination between two actors can signal to observers increased commitment (Michael et al., 2016). But do young children see coordination as a cue to commitment? The current study investigated the impact of coordination – with or without ostensive cues - on children’s commitment to a joint activity. In a between-subjects design with 3 conditions (N=72), we compared 4-year-olds responses when their adult play partner used: A) low coordination; B) high coordination; or C) high coordination with ostensive cues. We measured children’s commitment by recording if and when they left the game to play an attractive alternative, and their verbal and nonverbal acknowledgements (e.g., social referencing).Results failed to support the ‘coordination creates commitment’ hypothesis: children were more likely to leave the game in high coordination conditions than the low coordination condition (ȥ = 3.834, p<0.001) and were less likely to show acknowledgements (ȥ = -2.159, p<0.05). There were no significant differences between conditions regarding the stage when children left the game. Rather than inferring that coordination reduced children’s commitment, we concluded that children needed to social reference with the experimenter more in the low coordination condition, to check it was ok to leave.

For more details, or if you are interested in giving a talk, please contact Dr Jesse Preston j.preston@warwick.ac.uk