Dealing with uncertainty and different degrees of frequency and probability is critical in many everyday activities. However, relevant information does not always come in the form of numerical estimates or direct experiences, but is instead obtained through qualitative, rather vague verbal terms (e.g., “the virus often causes coughing” or “the train is likely to be delayed”). Investigating how people interpret and utilize different natural language expressions of frequency and probability is therefore crucial to understand reasoning and behavior in real-world situations. While there is considerable work exploring how adults understand everyday uncertainty phrases, very little is known about how children interpret them and how their understanding develops with age. We take a developmental and computational perspective to address this issue and examine how 4- to 14-year-old children and adults interpret different terms. Each participant provided numerical estimates for 14 expressions, comprising both frequency and probability phrases. In total we obtained 2856 quantitative judgments, including 2240 judgments from children. Our findings demonstrate that adult-like intuitions about the interpretation of everyday uncertainty terms emerge fairly early in development, with the quantitative estimates of children converging to those of adults from around 9 years on. We also demonstrate how the vagueness of verbal terms can be represented through probability distributions, which provides additional leverage for tracking developmental shifts through cognitive modeling techniques. Taken together, our findings provide key insights into the developmental trajectories underlying the understanding of everyday uncertainty terms, and open up novel methodological pathways to formally model the vagueness of probability and frequency phrases, which are abundant in our everyday life and activities.

中文翻译：

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理解日常不确定性术语的发展轨迹


在许多日常活动中，处理不确定性以及不同程度的频率和概率至关重要。然而，相关信息并不总是以数字估计或直接经验的形式出现，而是通过定性的、相当模糊的口头术语获得（例如，“病毒经常引起咳嗽”或“火车可能晚点”） 。因此，研究人们如何解释和利用频率和概率的不同自然语言表达对于理解现实世界中的推理和行为至关重要。尽管有大量工作探索成年人如何理解日常不确定性短语，但人们对儿童如何解释它们以及他们的理解如何随着年龄的增长而发展知之甚少。我们从发展和计算的角度来解决这个问题，并研究 4 至 14 岁的儿童和成人如何解释不同的术语。每个参与者提供了 14 个表达的数值估计，包括频率和概率短语。我们总共获得了 2856 个定量判断，其中 2240 个来自儿童的判断。我们的研究结果表明，对于日常不确定性术语的解释，类似成人的直觉在发展的早期就出现了，儿童的定量估计从大约 9 岁开始就与成人的定量估计趋同。我们还演示了如何通过概率分布来表示言语术语的模糊性，这为通过认知建模技术跟踪发展变化提供了额外的杠杆。 总而言之，我们的研究结果为理解日常不确定性术语的发展轨迹提供了关键见解，并开辟了新的方法论途径，对我们日常生活和活动中大量出现的概率和频率短语的模糊性进行正式建模。