Abstract
The referent of a deictic embedded in a particular utterance or sentence is often ambiguous. Reference assignment is a pragmatic process that enables the disambiguation of such a referent. Previous studies have demonstrated that receivers use social-pragmatic information during referent assignment; however, it is still unclear which aspects of cognitive development affect the development of referential processing in children. The present study directly assessed the relationship between performance on a reference assignment task (Murakami and Hashiya, in preparation) and the dimensional change card sort task (DCCS) in 3- and 5-years-old children. The results indicated that the 3-years-old children who passed DCCS showed performance above chance level in the event which required an explicit (cognitive) shift, while the performance of the children who failed DCCS remained in the range of chance level; however, such a tendency was not observed in the 5-years-old, possibly due to a ceiling effect. The results indicated that, though the development of skills that mediate cognitive shifting might adequately explain the explicit shift of attention in conversation, the pragmatic processes underlying the implicit shift, which requires reference assignment, might follow a different developmental course.
Highlights
The referent of a deictic embedded in an utterance or sentence is often ambiguous
We examined whether the children who passed the dimensional change card sort task (DCCS) showed better performance on the reference assignment task than the children who failed the DCCS; we used this classification as a categorical factor on the reference assignment task
For the reference assignment task, preliminary analysis revealed no gender differences or effect of trial order; these factors were collapsed in the subsequent analyses
Summary
The referent of a deictic embedded in an utterance or sentence is often ambiguous. We communicate with others by interpreting the intended referent embedded in an utterance. Other researches have further demonstrated that children of the same age interpret an ambiguous request for absent objects, such as “Can you give it for me?” (Ganea and Saylor, 2007) or “Where’s the ball?” (Saylor and Ganea, 2007), by reflecting on previous interactions with the experimenter that concerned particular objects. These studies agree in the sense that 2-years-old children have acquired the ability to use the relevant non-verbal information that has been gained through previous triad communications (self-object-other) in the process of interpreting an ambiguous referent
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