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

摘要

This research investigated young children's ability to use the perspective of their communicative partner to guide their production and interpretation of referential statements. The cognitive skills associated with successful perspective-taking in referential communication were also examined. In Experiment 1, 4.5- to 5.5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks during which they had to either instruct an experimenter to pick up an object (production task) or follow instructions to retrieve an object (comprehension task). They were also administered measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results indicate that children used the perspective of their speaking partner to guide their communicative behaviours in both the production and communication tasks. However, children did not completely disregard their own perspective during the production and interpretation of statements. Egocentric interpretations of speaker requests were negatively correlated with children's inhibitory control skills. No other dimensions of executive function skills related to children's communicative perspective-taking. These findings suggest that children's inhibitory control skills relate to their ability to inhibit their own perspective during communicative interactions. In Experiment 2, 3.5- to 4.5-year-old children were tested on the same comprehension task used in Experiment 1. To further explicate the relation between inhibitory control skills and children's use of another perspective when interpreting statements, preschoolers were administered measures of delay inhibition and conflict inhibition. Preschoolers' egocentric processing of the speaker's requests were related to their performance on the conflict inhibitory control tasks, whereas their simultaneous choice of both an object visible and blocked from the speaker's view was related to their performance on the delay inhibitory control tasks. The results of these studies suggest young children can differentiate between information that is accessible to the speaker versus information that is available only to them, and, moreover, they can use this information to guide their communicative behaviours. Furthermore, the results suggest that children's developing inhibitory control skills allow them to inhibit their own perspective, enabling them to make use of their communicative partner's perspective.