Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461
So, older preschoolers use speaker-specific epistemic reasoning to make mutual exclusivity inferences and interpret the meanings of novel labels. Though other assumptions, such as linguistic conventionality of labels, are no doubt important as well! (7/7)
We also tested children’s general Theory of Mind abilities and found that this predicts their ability to make adult-like evaluations of epistemic knowledge. Many open questions about how children draw on ToM abilities to reason about others’ linguistic knowledge and learn words! (6/7)
We found that from 4.5yos, children made more mutual exclusivity inferences when the label was taught compared to when it was invented. Children also made more mutual exclusivity inferences when they believed the speaker knew the introduced label, regardless of how it was introduced. (5/7)
We asked children whether the absent speaker knew this label. After the absent speaker returned and made a request using another word (e.g., ‘bem’), we asked whether children would exclude the already-labeled object from consideration. (4/7)
We expanded previous paradigms to differentiate these possibilities, by manipulating whether a label (e.g., ‘dax’) is taught vs. invented in the absence of a speaker (see Figure!) (3/7)
When children make mutual exclusivity inferences, they can do so by reasoning about what other labels a speaker knows (a la Gricean inferences), projecting their own knowledge onto the speaker, or reasoning generally that labels are shared by all speakers of the same language. (2/7)
Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
it's wild that R, the ubiquitous statistical computing language, was co-created by a Māori prof (Ross Ihaka) — and yet the vast majority of scientists who use R don't know
this is like inventing the toaster. possibly the largest impact of a single member of an indigenous community on modern science
We are currently conducting interviews with jsPsych users to help us shape long-term project goals. We are interested in speaking with folks with all levels of comfort with jsPsych. The interviews are happening over the next four weeks. Each session is 20-30 minutes. We are paying participants $20.
New preprint by the phenomenal @ebruevcen.bsky.social with @drbarner.bsky.social revealing that people interpret conditionals pragmatically, initially treating them as biconditionals! So excited to see where this work goes next, especially for children’s acquisition of conditionals!
notes on citing R and R Packages #rstats www.tjmahr.com/r-package-ci...
Another paper w/ @urvi.bsky.social, showing that Hindi kids learn yesterday/tomorrow earlier than English kids, despite Hindi expressing these with just one word 'kal'. We argue this is evidence for the priority of tense information (over associations with events). osf.io/preprints/os...
Happy to share this paper led by the fabulous @urvi.bsky.social. Turns out that children's struggle to understand temporal language may be partly because the things we refer to in tests of knowledge are not actually in the past or future & rely on hypothetical reasoning about imaginary timelines.
This suggests that reasoning about how number words encode exact quantities and how numbers relate to exactly equal sets emerges after learning to count. Exciting questions remain about how such learning happens! (4/4)
But children who can make this inference might not do so based on exact equality: they sometimes assign the same number word to two sets that are approximately equal, but differ by just 1 item❗(3/4)
Children who can count and construct large sets (CP-knowers in the literature) can infer the quantity of a hidden set from a set that appears equal, but children who only know small number words (subset-knowers) cannot 🧒 (2/4)