Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers often violate conversational expectations by offering less information than listeners need (Grice, 1975). Althoughchildren appear sensitive to such violations as comprehenders (Gweon & Asaba, 2018; Katsos & Bishop, 2011), it isunclear how they would respond to them in a reciprocal conversational setting. Here, we ask whether children tailor theinformativeness of their speech based on the informativeness of an interlocutor in a prior interaction. In an informativenessrating task, 4- and 5-year-old children evaluated the utterances of an informative and an under-informative interlocutor.Then, in a referential communication task, roles were reversed, and children produced referential descriptions for either theinformative or the under-informative interlocutor. Results showed that although children were sensitive to conversationalviolations, they did not tailor their utterances to their interlocutors informativeness. Although preliminary, these findingssuggest that cooperative expectations in linguistic exchanges might differ from those underlying broader (non-linguistic)social action.