A New Perspective on Children's Communicative Perspective Taking: When and How Do Children Use Perspective Inferences to Inform Their Comprehension of Spoken Language?

Abstract

Successful communication often requires a listener to reason about a speaker's perspective to make inferences about communicative intent. Although children can use perspective reasoning to influence their interpretation of spoken utterances, when and how children integrate perspective reasoning with language comprehension remain unclear. These questions are central to theoretical debates in language processing and have led to competing accounts of communicative perspective taking: early versus late integration. In this article, we examine how developmental evidence addresses the predictions of each account. Specifically, we review evidence to determine whether children can rapidly integrate perspective inferences when processing spoken language while central abilities (i.e., executive function and theory of mind) are still emerging.

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

“…From 3 years onwards, children use partner specific referential expressions (referential pacts), both with adults and peers (Köymen, Schmerse, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2014;Matthews, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2010). Interestingly, speaker identity influences children's interpretation of ambiguous utterances at an early point in language processing (Khu, Chambers, & Graham, 2019;San Juan, Khu, & Graham, 2015). However, these social inferences based on the identity of the conversational partners have rarely been studied in conjunction with discourse inferences.…”

Preschoolers Flexibly Shift Between Speakers' Perspectives During Real‐Time Language Comprehension

“…During the preschool years, children undergo critical gains in the ability to use shared knowledge to guide both the production and interpretation of referential language (Köymen, Mammen, & Tomasello, ; Matthews, Lieven, Theakston, & Tomasello, ; Nayer & Graham, ; Nilsen & Graham, , Nilsen, Graham, Smith, & Chambers, ; see Bohn & Köymen, , Graham, San Juan, & Khu, , San Juan, Khu, & Graham, for reviews). Most relevant to the current study is research examining preschoolers' integration of perspective information in real‐time language comprehension.…”

When You're Happy and I Know It: Four‐Year‐Olds’ Emotional Perspective Taking During Online Language Comprehension

“…Some studies, however, have found evidence for an egocentric bias—interference from a child's own point of view that limits the ability to fully consider a speaker's perspective—that decreases with age (e.g., Epley et al., ; Wang et al., ). The degree to which egocentricity is observed, and the point at which perspective integration occurs (i.e., early during language processing, as a sentence unfold, vs. later, after a sentence is understood in its entirety), depends on several factors including task complexity and the degree of conflict between the listener and speaker's perspective (San Juan, Khu, & Graham, ).…”