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Research on typicality has disclosed seemingly contradictory patterns in comprehenders and speakers: typical content is easier for comprehenders to process (Kamide et al. 2003) but is less frequently produced by speakers (Brown & Dell 1987). However, recent work shows that comprehenders also pay attention to speakers’ production preferences (e.g. Rohde et al. 2021, 2022) – the more the speaker's role as an intentional communicator is emphasised, the more comprehenders expect contributions about non-typical content, i.e., content that is cooperatively informative (Authors, submitted). Here, we ask whether children reason about speakers’ informativity goals in adult-like ways. If child-directed speech favours mention of typical events and properties, particularly at younger ages (Bergey et al. 2021), children may expect speech to transparently reflect what the world is like. In ongoing data collection, participants (ages 5-11) complete sentences about what is found at different locations. A bare condition only mentions the location (e.g. “At the beach, there’s _____”); a visible speaker condition uses first person and adds a photo of a speaker (“I’m at the beach, and there’s _____”). So far, results (N=111) show that children expect more informative completions with the visible speaker, with a trend towards more adult-like behaviour as age increases.

The aim of this article is to compare the Belgian family policy to policies in other countries within the so-called conservative welfare state regime group, namely, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and to the policy applied in one country that has adopted a social-democratic model, i.e., Sweden. Based on previous studies, we aim to identify strengths and weaknesses according to two criteria: efficacy in promoting fertility and promoting gender equity, the latter being understood as mothers’ involvement in the labour market and fathers’ involvement in care. We maintain that the Belgian family policy presents several features that have the potential to positively affect fertility. Such positive features mainly pertain to family allowances and birth premiums, together with enrolment rates for children under three years of age (albeit with worrisome, low public spending on childcare). However, other aspects of the Belgian policy are more critical for gender equity. Such aspects include the remuneration of parental leave and time credit, a lack of radical reforms to support fathers’ involvement, and regional disparities in several family policy measures. Counterintuitively, short durations for maternity leave and parental leave might also negatively affect gender equity.

This is a pre-registration for a study in a series of studies looking at expectations for informativity in language processing. Comprehenders rely on real-world knowledge when guessing upcoming content. For example, taking a sip from the waterfall is more expected than taking a sip from the transmitter (Kutas & Hillyard 1980). By contrast, speakers tend to omit typical content in favour of newsworthy content: they include an optional instrument more often when it is atypical, favouring the production of stab with an ice pick over stab with a knife (Brown & Dell 1987). These findings are taken to reflect constraints on cooperative communication whereby speakers’ contributions are expected to be appropriately informative and relevant (Grice 1975). If comprehenders are rational and are sensitive to speakers’ production preferences, these should also bear upon their predictions about upcoming content: that is, they should expect the kind of content that cooperative speakers are likely to mention, rather than just the kind of content that is likely to be the case in the real world. In our first study in this project (Experiment 1), we elicited sentence completions via a sentence continuation task as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material (Taylor 1953). We manipulated the salience of the speaker and showed that the more aware participants are of the speaker as an intentional communicator, the more informative they expect the speaker’s contribution to be. In the second study, we further found that this expectation for informativity is malleable depending on properties of the speaker (Grodner & Sedivy 2011). Participants were familiarised with two different speakers in an initial exposure phase: one speaker routinely made uninformative utterances, and one produced utterances that were highly informative. In the following sentence continuation task, participants expected more informative utterances from the high-informativity speaker compared to the low-informativity speaker. This third study will look at another aspect of how we might modulate our expectations for informativity: do comprehenders have different expectations for how informative a speaker's contribution will be when the addressee is a child compared to an adult? The study will use the same paradigm as the most speaker-salient condition in Experiment 1, which consisted of pictures of different (adult) speakers on the phone, with utterances to be completed embedded in a speech bubble.

Conversational partners expect each other to communicate rationally and cooperatively with relevant and informative utterances. Occasionally, however, speakers produce seemingly trivial utterances which may violate our expectations of informativity. In adults, we see trivial utterances interpreted as conveying additional information, e.g., implying that the situation has changed in some way. These inferences are more likely when a speaker is deemed as knowledgeable. Here we ask how children deal with seemingly trivial utterances from knowledgeable and unknowledgeable speakers. Preliminary findings (data collection ongoing) suggest that children are less sensitive to speaker knowledge than adults and draw fewer inferences from trivial utterances.

Recent work has demonstrated that children are able to use alternatives to derive pragmatic inferences. This work aims to extend those findings and update the previous registration submitted with methodological updates following a pilot study. The present project investigates how children make use of alternatives to derive quantity inferences. Recent developments in priming have suggested that pragmatic representations are involved in inferencing and these representations include alternatives. Building on the current work on pragmatic priming, three priming experiments are proposed to test whether children’s improvement in inferencing is related to pragmatic representations. It has been established that pragmatic priming is observed in 5 year olds with quantifiers and ad-hoc expresssions. Here I outline two experiments to extend this, first using numerical expressions and then looking at cross expression priming between numbers and quantifiers (as shown in Bott & Chemla, 2016).

We learn about the world through language. Communication is an inherently complicated process. On the surface it seems simple enough to take the sounds we hear and map those onto words and then onto meaning. However, listeners often go beyond the surface form of an utterance and compute additional meaning (Grice, 1975). That is, they compute pragmatic inferences. For example, if I say in conversation that there is a “yellow banana” this would give rise to the inference that there is another non-yellow banana present (Sedivy, 2003). Since the colour of a banana is typically rather mundane, as listeners we intuit why the speaker has chosen to specify the colour. Pragmatic inferences rely on the expectation that interlocutors communicate rationally and cooperatively. We have an expectation for conversational contributions to add something to the discourse (Rohde, Futrell, & Lucas, 2021). In the studies registered here we examine inferences that arise from mundane content at the propositional level. For example, if a speaker proffers a mundane utterance like “I saw that the library walls are blue” when talking about a location they are familiar with, a listener is licensed to look for a communicative reason for such a mundane contribution to the conversation (see Kravtchenko & Demberg 2015). Study 1 will examine how speaker characteristics influence the inferences drawn by listeners. Study 2 will examine how highlighting the speaker's intention to be communicative influences the inferences drawn by listeners.

Investigating the links between nature connectedness, positive affect, and wellbeing

This is a pre-registration for the second study of a project looking at expectations for informativity in language processing. Comprehenders rely on real-world knowledge when guessing upcoming content. For example, taking a sip from the waterfall is more expected than taking a sip from the transmitter (Kutas & Hillyard 1980). By contrast, speakers tend to omit typical content in favour of newsworthy content: they include an optional instrument more often when it is atypical, favouring the production of stab with an ice pick over stab with a knife (Brown & Dell 1987). These findings are taken to reflect constraints on cooperative communication whereby speakers’ contributions are expected to be appropriately informative and relevant (Grice 1975). If comprehenders are rational and are sensitive to speakers’ production preferences, these should also bear upon their predictions about upcoming content: that is, they should expect the kind of content that cooperative speakers are likely to mention, rather than just the kind of content that is likely to be the case in the real world. In our first study in this project (Experiment 1), we elicited sentence completions via a Cloze task as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material (Taylor 1953). We manipulated the salience of the speaker and showed that the more aware participants are of the speaker as an intentional communicator, the more informative they expect the speaker’s contribution to be. In this second study, we will investigate whether this expectation for informativity is further malleable depending on properties of the speaker (Grodner & Sedivy 2011). Specifically, we ask whether participants will adjust their expectations based on the speaking style of two different speakers: one speaker routinely makes uninformative utterances, and one produces utterances that are highly informative.

When speakers use language transparently, their intended meaning maps directly onto the form used, but language can also be used non-transparently, such that addressees must draw inferences beyond the speaker’s explicit message. To address the question of how addressees determine message transparency, we present two studies investigating effects of speaker knowledgeability and utterance form on comprehenders’ recognition of transparent language.

Here we elicit sentence completions via a Cloze task as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material (Taylor 1953). We manipulate the salience of the speaker and show that the more aware participants are of the speaker, the more informative they expect the speaker’s contribution to be.

Here we elicit sentence completions via a Cloze task as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material (Taylor 1953). We manipulate the salience of the speaker and show that the more aware participants are of the speaker as an intentional communicator, the more informative they expect the speaker’s contribution to be.

Background Literature started to describe proximity to kin over the life course, concentrating on general patterns. Little is known about kin proximity during childhood and how this varies with family structure. Objective We provide estimates on kinship structures and proximity to kin for children living with both parents, with only one parent (distinguishing whether the other parent is deceased, never registered, and in case of being alive, where the other parent lives (in the country vs. abroad)) or with no parent. Following two birth cohorts over childhood, we evaluate changes over the children’s life course and across time. Methods Data come from Belgian register-based data (DEMOBEL). We rely on information over household configuration, intergenerational links and place of residence of children born in 1992 and 2003, at age 8 and 16. We estimate the percentage of children having at least one relative (great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts/uncles, (half-)siblings) that are alive, living in the same household or living close and the average number of kin, by type of family structure and children’s age. Results Children living with both parents lived more often close to at least one grandparent and aunt/uncle than children living with only one parent. This gap is greater at age 16 than at age 8, but it is smaller for children born in 2003 compared to 1992. Contribution The life course of children has diversified in recent decades. Documenting how kinship structures differ for children living in different family structures enables to better understand inequalities in the possibilities of informal support.

Entre mars 2020 et février 2021, la pandémie Covid-19 a généré près de 22 000 décès en Belgique, soit l’épisode le plus meurtrier de son histoire démographique depuis la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Dans une perspective comparative des différentes vagues de la pandémie, cet article a pour objectif principal de dresser le bilan de la surmortalité liée à la Covid-19 selon l’âge, le sexe, la situation de ménage et le groupe social. Les analyses se basent sur des données agrégées fournies par STATBEL (office belge de statistiques). Des indicateurs de surmortalité sont calculés afin de comparer la situation de l’année 2020 avec celle observée durant la période de référence 2015-2019. A partir des données du Registre national, des tables de mortalité par sexe, région et groupe social ont été calculées. Elles permettent d’estimer la perte d’espérance de vie en 2020 par rapport à 2019 et la contribution spécifique des différents groupes d’âge à cette diminution.

During conversations, speakers make decisions both about what they want to convey and how to communicate that with language. Previous research established that speakers are biased toward efficient communication: being sufficiently informative for listeners, while minimizing their own production effort (Grice, 1975; Jaeger & Buz, 2018; Zipf, 1949). Hence, efficient speakers expend less effort producing redundant elements (i.e., those typical of the situation and predictable with real-life knowledge). For example, Westerbeek et al. (2015) found more mentions of the colour blue over red when referring to tomatoes, thereby reducing redundancy since tomatoes are stereotypically red. This creates an interesting situation when speaking to children. Unlike adult interlocutors, who have already acquired sufficient real-world knowledge, children are still learning what is typical in the world. Therefore, what is redundant for an adult may not be such for a child. Consequently, when talking to children, the pressure for efficiency may be outweighed by the need to use language informatively to explain how the world is, thereby leading speakers to produce signals that would be considered to be redundant for adults in order to maximize the informativity for a child. Tal et al. (2021a, 2021b) showed that speakers used longer references like full noun phrases for highly predictable targets when talking to younger compared to older children, and this redundancy declined as children aged.

Comprehenders rely on real-world knowledge when guessing upcoming content. For example, taking a sip from the waterfall is more expected than taking a sip from the transmitter (Kutas & Hillyard 1980). Conversely, speakers tend to omit typical content in favour of newsworthy content: they include an optional instrument more often when it is atypical, favouring the production of stab with an ice pick over stab with a knife (Brown &Dell 1987). These findings are taken to reflect constraints on cooperative communication whereby speakers’ contributions are expected to be appropriately informative and relevant (Grice 1975).

International audience; La Belgique apparaît comme l’un des pays du monde où le taux de mortalité par le Covid-19 est le plus élevé. Cette contribution a pour objectif d’analyser les disparités spatiales de la mortalité liée à l’épidémie de Covid-19 en Belgique sur l’ensemble de l’année 2020 mais aussi lors de chacune des deux grandes vagues de mortalité. Pour cela, nous utilisons les données diffusées par Statbel, à savoir le nombre de décès au niveau de la commune, pour calculer un indicateur de surmortalité par territoire. Ce dernier est ensuite cartographié à l’aide d’une méthode de lissage spatial pour mieux révéler les structures spatiales. Les résultats mettent en évidence une géographie différente entre la 1ère et la 2e vague de l’épidémie. Les foyers principaux de forte surmortalité ne sont pas les mêmes pour chacune des vagues. La cartographie montre des structures spatiales qui ne renvoient pas aux facteurs classiquement identifiés pour rendre compte de la diffusion d’une maladie contagieuse. L’explication de la géographie de la mortalité liée à de l’épidémie en Belgique est loin d’être aisée.

International audience

International audience

International audience

The aim of this article is to describe Belgian family policy in comparison with the policy of other countries in the so-called conservative welfare state regime group, namely, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and with the policy of one country with a social-democratic model, Sweden. On the basis of previous literature, we also aim to identify strengths and weaknesses according to two criteria: efficacy in promoting fertility and gender equity. Belgian family policy presents several strengths. Its family allowances and birth premiums are among the most generous. Enrolment rates for children under three years old are among the highest. Recent findings have shown a positive association between these features of Belgian policy and couples’ fertility. However, other aspects of Belgian policy are more critical for gender equity. They regard the nature of public spending on families, the duration of maternity leave, the remuneration of parental leave, the lack of radical reforms to support fathers’ involvement, and the sub-national disparities in some family policy measures.

We learn about the world through language. Communication is an inherently complicated process. On the surface it seems simple enough to take the sounds we hear and map those onto words and then map them onto meaning. However, listeners often go beyond the surface form of an utterance and compute additional meaning (Grice, 1975). That is, they compute pragmatic inferences.