April 13: Adrienne Wente & Ruthe Foushee

Department of Psychology Graduate students, Adrienne Wente and Ruthe Foushee, will be presenting their research.

Adrienne Wente:

The development of free will beliefs in Chinese and U.S. children
This talk will discuss the development of beliefs about free will in Chinese and U.S. children. Here, free will is defined as the ability to choose to do otherwise. In this study, Chinese and U.S. 4- and 6-year-olds answered a series of questions to gauge whether they believe that they themselves and other people can freely choose to inhibit or act against their desires. Children were also asked to explain why they believe people can practice choice. Results indicate that children from both cultures increase the amount of choice they ascribed with age. However, findings also suggest cultural variability both in how much choice children ascribe, as well as how they
characterize the causal process of choice.

Ruthe Foushee:

Subjective Semantics: Children's semantic development and theory of mind

While semantic compositionality is fundamental to language, and must ultimately be mastered by the child, developing a compositional semantics might be difficult in part because some words have subjective meanings. Some words, like “pretty” (or “tasty,” etc.), are inherently subjective: whether or not a dax is “pretty” doesn’t depend on any property of the world, but is instead a matter of personal preference that speakers can disagree about. By contrast, other words, like “striped” (or “square,” etc.) have fixed, objective meanings: whether or not a dax is “striped” depends on whether the dax has stripes, and is independent of who is describing the dax. Finally, although the meanings of other words like “tall” (or “big,” etc.) depend on objective properties – e.g., for a dax to be “tall” it must be taller than most other daxes – they can also be subjective, and depend on a person’s past experience. 
I will be talking about the theoretical background and methods for a project in its early stages exploring children’s ability to integrate subjectivity in their compositional semantics, which requires them to coordinate not only their knowledge about word meanings and the world, but also to consider others’ personal preferences and past experiences. Preliminary data suggests that adults are sensitive to speakers' personal experience in evaluating the truth of their utterances using vague predicates, and that this sensitivity is developing during the preschool years. 

These talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.