Abstract
When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers' tendency to use cues both within the communicative context (i.e. a speaker's visual access to information) and within the speech signal itself (i.e. emotional prosody) to make on-line inferences about communicative intent. Our review demonstrates that preschoolers' ability to use visual and emotional cues of perspective to guide language interpretation is not uniform across tasks, is sometimes related to theory of mind and executive function skills, and, at certain points of development, is only revealed by implicit measures of language processing.
Highlights
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many
Given the early development of visual perspective taking, when do children first begin to consider the visual perspectives of others in communicative interactions? The first studies to examine this question suggested that before children reach school-age, they are largely egocentric in their referential communication and fail to integrate feedback from their communicative partner (e.g. Glucksberg & Krauss, ; Krauss & Glucksberg, )
Five-yearolds, demonstrated their use of emotional prosody in their explicit referential decisions. These findings indicate that, between four and five years of age, preschoolers move from an implicit understanding of emotional prosody in referential communication tasks to a more explicit use of this cue
Summary
You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. Words are not enough: how preschoolers’ integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding*
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