Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Words and emotional expressions each convey information, but together they can reveal more than either cue alone. Adults integrate these cues to make nuanced inferences, but when does this capacity emerge in development? Children aged 5-10 (N=210) and adults (N=35) watched videos in which a person tasted a friend's food, smiled or frowned, and stated that it "tastes good" or "tastes bad." Participants were asked to infer the food's taste and the speaker's communicative goals. For food taste, adults prioritized negative emotions when cues conflicted; for communicative goals, they used both cues to infer a goal to be honest and relied primarily on speech to infer a goal to make others feel good. Children exhibited substantial developmental progression between ages 5 and 7, although subtle differences from adults persisted at age 10. These results suggest middle childhood is a pivotal period for learning to make sophisticated inferences from multiple cues.