Showing papers by "Brian P. Ackerman published in 1983"
TL;DR: The authors examined children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances and found that children and adults differ both in accomplishing these processes and in their use of these cues.
184 citations
TL;DR: This article found that the assumption of speaker credibility affects children's judgments of the external consistency of statements, and that the speaker was either an adult or a child, thus the contextual source was either more or less reliable than the speaker.
40 citations
TL;DR: The authors used semantic orienting questions at both acquisition and retrieval for elementary school children (7 and 10 years of age) and adults to determine some of the reasons for developmental differences in retrieval variability.
16 citations
TL;DR: The results showed that the judgements of both groups of children were to the discourse context of the communications, and the children discriminated between the functionally informative and ambiguous communications.
Abstract: This study determined whether young children are sensitive to the contextual influence of previous discourse on judgements of the adequacy of referential communications. Four- and six-year-old children were read short stories containing terminal referential communications that were either ambiguous or informative relative to a perceptual display of candidate-referential objects. Contextual information was given in the story prior to the terminal communication that was irrelevant to the ambiguous communications or that made these communications functionally informative. The subjects were required to say whether the listener in the story could identify one unique referent. The results showed that the judgements of both groups of children were sensitive to the discourse context of the communications. The children discriminated between the functionally informative and ambiguous communications.
7 citations