Young children create partner-specific referential pacts with peers.

Abstract

In 2 studies, we investigated how peers establish a referential pact to call something, for example, a cushion versus a pillow (both equally felicitous). In Study 1, pairs of 4- and 6-year-old German-speaking peers established a referential pact for an artifact, for example, a woman's shoe, in a referential communication task. Six-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, continued to use these same expressions with the same partner (even when they were overinformative) but shifted to simpler expressions, for example, shoe, with a new partner. In Study 2, both age groups were successful in establishing such partner-specific referential pacts with a peer when using a proper name. These results suggest that even preschool children appreciate something of the conventional nature of linguistic expressions, with significant flexibility emerging between ages 4 and 6.

The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“…In this sense, children’s adaptations for interacting with peers during early and middle childhood are very likely deferred adaptations, whose adaptive significance lies in the ways in which they prepare children for adulthood. During early and middle childhood children learn to make decisions with others—for example, about where to go or what to play (Köymen et al 2014). They learn to treat others fairly—for example, by sharing resources in a mutually satisfactory manner (Hamann et al 2011).…”

Revisiting the Memory‐Based Processing Approach to Common Ground

“…H&G should not be seen as entailing a commitment to a distinctly egocentric component to production (e.g., Köymen, Schmerse, Lieven, & Tomasello, ). On our view, utterance plans, from the earliest moments of speech planning, will indeed generally be influenced by information readily accessible from memory, and sometimes this will consist primarily of an individual's private knowledge.…”

Global Similarities and Multifaceted Differences in the Production of Partner-Specific Referential Pacts by Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…After conversational partners develop a referential pact, if a new partner who was not involved in entrainment is introduced, the entrained term is less likely to be maintained by directors (Brennan and Clark, 1996 ) or expected by matchers (Metzing and Brennan, 2003 ; Brown-Schmidt, 2009 ). Recent work with typically-developing children shows that children as young as 4 years old maintain referential precedents with their peers in a partner–specific manner (Köymen et al, 2014 ) and that 3- and 4-year-olds expect adult speakers to maintain referential precedents in a partner–specific manner (Matthews et al, 2010 ; Graham et al, 2014 ). The mechanisms underlying the comprehension of referential precedents is an area of active debate, at the heart of which is whether high-level common ground inferences or low-level memory mechanisms (episodic priming and encoding cues) best explain the effects (Brennan and Hanna, 2009 ; Brown-Schmidt, 2009 ; Shintel and Keysar, 2009 ; Kronmüller and Barr, 2015 ).…”

“…The mechanisms underlying the comprehension of referential precedents is an area of active debate, at the heart of which is whether high-level common ground inferences or low-level memory mechanisms (episodic priming and encoding cues) best explain the effects (Brennan and Hanna, 2009 ; Brown-Schmidt, 2009 ; Shintel and Keysar, 2009 ; Kronmüller and Barr, 2015 ). The task we use stands somewhat outside this debate as it is a production task, and prior work on production used a different paradigm with familiar objects with known names rather than tangram stimuli (Brennan and Clark, 1996 ; Köymen et al, 2014 ). We view our task, where participants as directors need to create agreed upon terms for complex novel stimuli through interaction with a matcher, as one that inherently requires collaboration.…”