Young children’s pauses and hesitations while speaking can reveal how accurate their answers are, but these cues do not reliably indicate their own sense of confidence, according to a new study published in Developmental Science.
The study, conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia, explored whether children aged five to eight use verbal disfluencies, such as filler words like “umm” and “uhh”, hedges like “maybe” and “I think”, and speech delays, as signals of their own confidence during decision-making tasks.
Sixty children participated in tasks where they answered various questions about animals and numerical comparisons, after which they indicated which of two answers they felt more confident about. Researchers tracked the frequency of verbal disfluencies and compared these with both the accuracy of the answers and the children’s confidence ratings.
Children consistently produced more verbal hesitations and took longer to begin answering when their responses were incorrect. They also hesitated more frequently when indicating low confidence. Initially, these findings suggested that verbal disfluencies might be a direct indication of children’s confidence levels.
However, when the researchers looked closely at instances where children’s accuracy and confidence judgments diverged – such as giving a correct answer but feeling unsure, or giving a wrong answer with high confidence – the association broke down. In these situations, the frequency of fillers and hedges no longer predicted confidence, and surprisingly, longer delays before speaking were associated with higher confidence, contradicting expectations.
These results indicate that while children’s verbal disfluencies are effective markers of answer accuracy, they do not reliably reflect a child’s internal confidence. The study suggests that children may be using multiple, separate cues to judge their confidence, rather than relying solely on the fluency or ease with which an answer comes to mind.
Importantly, the findings have potential implications for practical scenarios such as education and eyewitness testimony, where interpreting a child’s certainty about their answers is crucial. The researchers argue that relying solely on verbal disfluencies to assess a child’s confidence could be misleading, especially when accuracy and confidence diverge.
The study further highlights how children’s metacognitive skills, which involve reflecting on one’s own thinking and decision-making, evolve with age. Although older children generally exhibited greater accuracy and were better at distinguishing between confident and uncertain responses, their verbal disfluency patterns remained similar across age groups.
One key takeaway from the research is the need for caution when interpreting children’s verbal hesitations. Educators, parents, and professionals involved in child questioning scenarios, such as in educational settings or even in forensic contexts, should be aware that verbal hesitation may indicate uncertainty about correctness, but not necessarily a lack of confidence from the child’s perspective.
Understanding how children assess their certainty is essential not only for developmental psychology but also in practical scenarios, such as educational testing and forensic interviews, where misinterpretations can have serious consequences.
