“Um…” as a window into the mind
Delays and disfluencies (“um”) are ubiquitous in everyday conversation and often signal rich information about what’s going on inside a speaker’s mind. How—and how quickly—something is said can be as meaningful as what is said. In this line of work, I investigate how children (and adults) use disfluencies to infer a speaker’s underlying mental processes. My research explores how children use these cues to reason about just how much someone knows and what their true underlying feelings are. In this work, I argue that children's reasoning about delays and disfluencies is inferential (vs. heuristic), broad (vs. limited), and flexible (vs. fixed).
When speakers made factual claims, children by 4 inferred that disfluent speakers were less knowledgeable (despite their accuracy), but blocked this inference when speakers claimed ignorance (Experiment 1). When speakers discussed preferences, children by 6 inferred that disfluent speakers had weaker preferences (Experiment 2), and generalized the meaning of disfluencies in radically different ways across these conversational contexts (Experiment 3). Overall, children use disfluencies to reason flexibly and inferentially about the mental states behind someone’s words.