Zhao, Lin and Wang, Jen Jessica and Apperly, Ian (2018) The cognitive demands of remembering a speaker’s perspective and managing common ground size modulate 8- and 10-year-olds’ perspective-taking abilities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 174. pp. 130-149. ISSN 0022-0965
Zhao_Wang_Apperly_JECP_preprint.pdf - Accepted Version
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Abstract
Using “theory of mind” to successfully accommodate differing perspectives during communication requires much more than just acquiring basic theory of mind understanding. Evidence suggests that children’s ability to adopt a speaker’s perspective continues to develop through childhood to adolescence till adulthood (e.g., Dumontheil, Apperly, & Blakemore, 2010). The present study examined the cognitive factors that could account for variations in children’s abilities to use a speaker’s perspective during language comprehension, and whether the same factors contribute to age-related improvements. Our study incorporated into a commonly-used communication task two types of memory demands which are frequently present in our everyday communication but have been overlooked in the previous literature: remembering a speaker’s perspective, and the amount of common ground information. Findings from two experiments demonstrated that both 8- and 10-year-olds committed more egocentric errors when each of these memory demands was high. Our study also found some supporting evidence for the age-related improvement in children’s perspective use, as 10-year-olds generally committed fewer egocentric errors compared to 8-year-olds. Interestingly, there was no clear evidence that the memory factors that affected children’s perspective use in our experiments were also the factors that drove age-related improvement.