The Confused Robot: Two‐Year‐Olds’ Responses to Breakdowns in Conversation

Abstract

Preschool children at two ages conversed with a toy robot during a play session. During the conversations the robot inserted either general (e.g., What?) or specific (e.g., Piggy is in what?) contingent queries in response to selected utterances. The children’s replies to these breakdowns in conversation indicated they were sensitive to the pragmatic requirements of these different types of query. By 33 months of age, the children replied to general queries with complete repetitions of their prior misunderstood utterance, and replied to specific queries with only the required constituentinformation. At 27 months of age, the children’s predominant strategy was to reply to both forms of query with complete repetitions, although the data suggest some degree of sensitivity to these different forms is also present in this younger group. These results are interpreted in terms of children’s sensitivity to Grice’s (1975) quantity rule and the potential changes in social cognition underlying children’s compliance with this rule.