The relations between children’s communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning

Abstract

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.

Language complexity modulates 8- and 10-year-olds’ success at using their theory of mind abilities in a communication task

“…Although sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective emerges as early as 3 to 5 years of age (Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Nilsen & Graham, 2009), there is a continuous reduction of egocentric errors on communication tasks between age 7 and 17 years (Dumontheil et al, 2010). That a continuous improvement is seen after the age at which children pass conceptual tests of visual perspective (Moll & Tomasello, 2006) and theory of mind (Wellman et al, 2001;Wimmer & Perner, 1983) suggests that the improvement is likely driven by an advancing ability to use perspectival information rather than acquiring further understanding of others' perspectives.…”

“…The only direct evidence on factors affecting children's use of perspective information comes from Nilsen and Graham (2009), who found that higher rates of egocentric errors were associated with poorer inhibitory control. Similar trends were observed for measures of working memory though these effects did not reach significance.…”

Development of audience design in children with and without ASD.

“…Although subsequent research has shown that children aged around 4 or 5 (Nilsen & Graham, 2009), 5 or 6 (Bahtiyar & Küntay, 2008;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002) show sensitivity to the addressee's perspective in the production of contrastive adjectives, research has also shown that unlike adults, AUDIENCE DESIGN IN CHILDREN 6 words to novel referents like children without ASD (Tek, Jaffery, Fein, & Naigles, 2008) and use the same contextual information as their controls when doing so (De Marchena, Eigsti, Worek, Ono, & Snedeker, 2011;Preissler & Carey, 2005). When producing sentences, high-functioning children with ASD can also align sentence structures with their partner, demonstrating unimpaired syntactic representations (Allen, Haywood, Rajendran, & Branigan, 2010).…”

Sources of individual differences in the speed of naming objects and actions: The contribution of executive control

“…These are general cognitive processes that define and maintain the individual's goals, recruit appropriate perceptual and response mechanisms, and monitor their performance (e.g., Norman & Shallice, 1986;Posner & Petersen, 1990). When we speak, we need to choose our words wisely (e.g., considering our goals and the common ground between interlocutors; Nilsen & Graham, 2009;Ye & Zhou, 2009), allocate sufficient processing capacity to our speech planning processes (e.g., Cook & Meyer, 2008;Ferreira & Pashler, 2002;Roelofs, 2008aRoelofs, , 2008b, and monitor our speech output for appropriateness and correctness. We also need to choose and maintain an appropriate speech rate and register (e.g., child-directed speech or the formal style required for a sermon, see Meyer, Konopka, Wheeldon, & van der Meulen, 2012).…”