Two experiments investigated children's communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document children's emergent use of the perspective of their speaking partner to guide their communicative behaviors in both a production and comprehension task. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-old children used a speaker's perspective to guide their interpretation of instructions. In both experiments, egocentric interpretations of speaker requests were negatively correlated with children's inhibitory control skills. Results of these studies demonstrate that young children can differentiate between information that is accessible to the speaker versus privileged knowledge, and use this information to guide their communicative behaviors. Furthermore, the results suggest that children's inhibitory control skills allow them to inhibit their own perspective, enabling them to make use of their communicative partner's perspective.

Processing of facial expressions has been shown to potentiate orienting of attention toward the direction signaled by gaze in adults, an important social-cognitive function. However, little is known about how this social attention skill develops. This study is the first to examine the developmental trajectory of the gaze orienting effect (GOE), its modulations by facial expressions, and its links with theory of mind (ToM) abilities. Dynamic emotional stimuli were presented to 222 participants (7-25 years old) with normal trait anxiety using a gaze-cuing paradigm. The GOE was found as early as 7 years of age and decreased linearly until 12-13 years, at which point adult levels were reached. Both fearful and surprised expressions enhanced the GOE compared with neutral expressions. The GOE for fearful faces was also larger than for joyful and angry expressions. These effects did not interact with age and were not driven by intertrial variance. Importantly, the GOE did not correlate with ToM abilities as assessed by the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test. The implication of these findings for clinical and typically developing populations is discussed.

No abstract

7307This is an unofficial preprint version, which may not exactly replicate the published version. It is not the copy of record.

Four-year-olds were asked to assess an adult listener's knowledge of the location of a hidden sticker after the listener was provided an ambiguous or unambiguous description of the sticker location. When preschoolers possessed private knowledge about the sticker location, the location they chose indicated that they judged a description to be unambiguous even when the message was ambiguous from the listener's perspective. However, measures of implicit awareness (response latencies and eye movement measures) demonstrated that even when preschoolers had private knowledge about the sticker location, ambiguous messages led to more consideration of an alternative location and longer response latencies than unambiguous messages. The findings demonstrate that children show sensitivity to linguistic ambiguity earlier than previously thought and, further, that they can detect linguistic ambiguity in language directed to others even when their own knowledge clarifies the intended meaning.