Do They Really Mean It? Children’s Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 63; no. 4; pp. 689 - 712
• Main Authors: Rothermich, K., Caivano, O., Knoll, L.J., Talwar, V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.12.2020; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Age; Age differences; Beliefs; Children; Gender differences; Inference; Interpersonal communication; Negative Attitudes; Young adults; development; Speaker intentions; sarcasm; children; teasing; lying
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/0023830919878742

Interpreting other people’s intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children’s understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of young adults using different speaker intentions. After watching each video clip, children answered questions about the characters and their beliefs, and the perceived friendliness of the speaker. Children’s responses reveal age and gender differences in the ability to interpret speaker belief and social intentions, especially for scenarios conveying teasing and prosocial lies. We found that the ability to infer speaker belief of prosocial lies and to interpret social intentions increases with age. Our results suggest that children at the age of 8 years already show adult-like abilities to understand literal statements, whereas the ability to infer specific social intentions, such as teasing and prosocial lies, is still developing between the age of 8 and 12 years. Moreover, girls performed better in classifying prosocial lies and sarcasm as insincere than boys. The outcomes expand our understanding of how children observe speaker intentions and suggest further research into the development of teasing and prosocial lie interpretation.