Children with stronger executive functioning and fewer ADHD traits produce more effective referential statements

Nilsen, Elizabeth S.; Varghese, Anisha L.; Xu, Zhaoxia; Fecica, Agnieszka M.

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2015.09.001

Cited by 20 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 90 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Therefore, maintaining a "particular" model of the listener, as opposed to a more "generic" one seems to be associated with additional costs. This analysis is consistent with findings showing that children with better cognitive skills (e.g., executive functioning, working memory, mentalizing skills) are also better communicators (e.g., Nilsen & Graham, 2009;Nilsen et al, 2015;Resches & P erez Pereira, 2007;Wardlow & Heyman, 2016).…”

Section: Audience Design In Children and Adultssupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Furthermore, children may produce utterances that are underinformative for listeners because of limitations in cognitive abilities such as working memory and inhibition, or mentalizing skills such as Theory of Mind (Allen, Skarabela, & Hughes, 2008;Bannard et al, 2017;Brown-Schmidt, 2009;Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004;Nilsen & Fecica, 2011;Nilsen & Graham, 2009;Nilsen, Varghese, Xu, & Fecica, 2015;Wardlow & Heyman, 2016). In support of this possibility, informative language use in children during reference disambiguation tasks is associated with increased ability to explicitly report what each conversational partner knows (Roberts & Patterson, 1983), better performance on independent Theory of Mind tasks (Resches & P erez Pereira, 2007), and stronger working memory (e.g., Nilsen & Graham, 2009;Nilsen et al, 2015;Wardlow & Heyman, 2016). At present, however, it is not clear whether standardized, global measures of cognitive skills are the best predictor of the entire range of children's pragmatic abilities or whether different types of adjustments to listeners engage specific cognitive mechanisms to different degrees (see also Roberts & Patterson, 1983;Wardlow & Heyman, 2016).…”

Section: Explanations Of Children's Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

Grigoroglou

Papafragou

2019

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Adults design utterances to match listeners' informational needs by making both “generic” adjustments (e.g., mentioning atypical more often than typical information) and “particular” adjustments tailored to their specific interlocutor (e.g., including things that their addressee cannot see). For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. Three experiments investigated how generic and particular factors affect children's production. In Experiment 1, 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children and adults described typical and atypical instrument events to a silent listener who could either see or not see the events. In later extensions, participants described the same events to either a silent (Experiment 2) or an interactive (Experiment 3) addressee with a specific goal. Both adults and 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds performed generic adjustments but, unlike adults, children made listener‐particular adjustments inconsistently. These and prior findings can be explained by assuming that particular adjustments can be costlier for children to implement compared to generic adjustments.

show abstract

Section: Audience Design In Children and Adultssupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Explanations Of Children's Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

Grigoroglou

Papafragou

2019

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, Nilsen, Varghese, Xu, and Fecica (2015) reported a relationship between working memory and reference production for 9-to 12-year-olds.…”

Section: Cognitive Influencesmentioning

confidence: 96%

The roles of feedback and working memory in children’s reference production

Wardlow

Heyman

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Studies by e.g. Bacso & Nilsen, 2017;Nilsen & Graham, 2009;and Nilsen, Varghese, Xu, & Fecica, 2015 suggest that greater working memory enables children to more effectively hold features of a target object in mind and compare them with contrasting objects (see also Hendriks, 2016 for supporting evidence from cognitive modeling). Similarly, previous research has implied that stronger cognitive flexibility enables children to notice multiple dimensions of an object (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Look before you speak: children's integration of visual information into informative referring expressions

Davies

Kreysa

2018

J. Child Lang.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n=57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g. to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye movements reveal that although four-year-olds fixate contrast objects to a similar extent as seven-year-olds and adults, this does not result in explicit referential informativeness. Instead, four-year-olds frequently omit distinguishing information from their referring expressions regardless of the comprehensiveness of their visual scan. In contrast, older children make greater use of information gleaned from their visual inspections, like adults. Thus, we find a barrier not to the INCIDENCE of contrast fixations by younger children, but to their USE of them in referential informativeness. We recommend that follow-up work investigates whether younger children's immature executive skills prevent them from describing referents in relation to contrast objects.

show abstract

Children with stronger executive functioning and fewer ADHD traits produce more effective referential statements

Cited by 20 publications

References 90 publications

Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

The roles of feedback and working memory in children’s reference production

Look before you speak: children's integration of visual information into informative referring expressions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About