{"pk":25524,"title":"Knowing what he could have shown: The role of alternatives in children’s\nevaluation of under-informative teachers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"What underlies young children’s failure in evaluating underinformative\nteachers? We explore the hypothesis that children\nhave difficulty representing relevant alternatives; knowing\nwhat the teacher could have done. Children rated two\nteachers who demonstrated toys to a na¨ıve learner. One group\nfirst observed a fully informative teacher and then an underinformative\nteacher, while the other group saw the reverse order.\nSix- and seven-year-olds successfully rated the underinformative\nteacher lower than the fully-informative teacher\nregardless of the order (Exp.1). However, four- and five-yearolds\nshowed this pattern only when they saw the fully informative\nteacher first (Exp.2). Given a binary choice after seeing\nboth teachers, four-year-olds showed a preference for the fully\ninformative teacher (Exp.3). We discuss these results in light\nof recent literature on children’s understanding of pragmatic\nviolations in linguistic communication; the contrast between\nthe fully informative vs. under-informative teachers might help\nchildren understand what the teacher could have shown.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Cognitive Development"},{"word":"Pragmatics"},{"word":"scalar implicature"},{"word":"pedagogical reasoning"},{"word":"Theory of mind"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59n5z8fv","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Hyowon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gweon","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Mika","middle_name":"","last_name":"Asaba","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25524/galley/15148/download/"}]}