Sixteen-month-olds comprehend unanchored absent reference

A nascent understanding of absent reference emerges around 12 months: provided with rich contextual support, infants look and point to the location of a displaced object. When can infants understand absent reference without contextual support? Using a procedure modified from Hendrickson and Sundara (2017), 13- and 16-month-olds first listened to utterances containing familiar target words, while viewing a checkerboard. Then, two objects – a referent and a distractor (e.g., a cup and a shoe) – appeared on the screen. Only 16-month-olds demonstrated a reliable looking preference for the referents, suggesting that listening to the utterances activated their mental images of the referents. These results establish that at 16 months, infants comprehend reference to absent entities without any contextual support.

Discussing those not present: comprehension of references to absent caregivers

The ability to understand references to the absent enables conversation to move beyond the here-and-now to matters distant in both space and time. Such understanding requires appreciating the relation between language and communicative intent: one must recognize speakers' intentions to use language to converge on a shared conversational focus that is at least somewhat independent of the current context. Despite its centrality to language development, the emergence of absent reference understanding has received little systematic attention. The present research investigated the responses of 60 infants aged 1;0 to 2;6 to a researcher talking about both present and absent caregivers. When infants aged 1;3 and older heard talk about absent caregivers they displayed a complex of nonverbal communicative responses that were divergent from their responses to talk about a present person. Infants aged 2;0 and older provided responses indicating understanding of absent reference. The findings suggest that by 1;3 infants may have at least a tacit appreciation of language as a device for coordinating conversational focus, and hint at increased sophistication in infants' absent reference comprehension skills at 2;0.

Language style as audience design

ABSTRACTThe style dimension of language variation has not been adequately explained in sociolinguistic theory. Stylistic or intraspeaker variation derives from and mirrors interspeaker variation. Style is essentially speakers' response to their audience. In audience design, speakers accommodate primarily to their addressee. Third persons – auditors and overhearers – affect style to a lesser but regular degree. Audience design also accounts for bilingual or bidialectal code choices. Nonaudience factors like topic and setting derive their effect by association with addressee types. These style shifts are mainly responsive – caused by a situational change. Speakers can also use style as initiative, to redefine the existing situation. Initiative style is primarily referee design: divergence from the addressee and towards an absent reference group. Referee design is especially prevalent in mass communication. (Sociolinguistic variation, code-switching. bilingualism, accommodation theory, ethnography of communication, mass communication)