Young children’s sensitivity to polite stance expressed through audiovisual prosody in requests

While children’s acquisition of lexically encoded politeness formulas has been investigated to a certain extent, little is known about their sensitivity to prosody and facial expressions as cues to politeness. The goal of this paper is to test the ability of 3-year-old American English-speaking children to recognize a speaker’s polite stance in their native language based on prosodic and facial gestural politeness cues. A total of 36 3-year-olds were presented with recordings of an adult performing child-directed polite and non-polite requests, where the videos consisted of either audio-only (AO), visualonly (VO) or audio-visual (AV) modalities. Polite and nonpolite requests differed only in terms of prosody and facial expressions, though all spoken requests followed the same structure and included the word please. Each request asked the child to place a specified object in the bucket in front of the twin that had asked more nicely. Analysis of the results suggests that at age three children are clearly able to access a speaker’s polite stance through both prosody and facial gesture cues.