Sophie Regan: We Finish Each Other's Sandwiches: Preschoolers Use Sociolinguistic Cues to Predict and Interpret Utterances 

Listeners are posed with a difficult task: they must comprehend a rapidly unfolding speech stream in a very short amount of time. What mechanisms allow us to do this so consistently and reliably? Increasing evidence suggests that listeners are constantly predicting future words and meanings. Furthermore, prior research has demonstrated that listeners are adept at integrating contextual information when forming these predictions. However, not much research in this domain has examined one of the central factors of the context of an utterance, namely the particular speaker producing it. Given that there is variability among speakers at every linguistic level, an efficient listener should be able to easily update their expectations about how someone will speak and what they will say. In this talk, I will share findings from three experiments that demonstrate young children can use information about a speaker’s group to predict and interpret the speaker’s utterances. I will then discuss the very exciting implications of these findings and hint at future directions.

Oded Ritov: Evolution and Cross-Cultural Judgments of Anger

Emotions are described as the grammar of social living: they give structure and meaning to our interactions with others. However, relatively little is known about the ways social expectations shape our emotional responses. In this talk, I will present preliminary data from two studies investigating anger – a much maligned emotion – within the context of social expectations. Often considered an emotion best avoided, anger nevertheless fulfills adaptive functions in regulating our relationships with both close and distant others. The first study examines the evolutionary role of anger in close relationships by asking whether chimpanzees get more or less upset when a friend steals food from them (compared with a neutral gender- and rank-matched groupmate). The second study is a cross-cultural investigation of the normative judgments of anger in children from China and the United States, asking whether 5-12 year-olds believe that anger is an appropriate response to unfair treatment. Both of these projects are still works in progress, so I am looking forward to getting feedback from the IHD community.