This project addresses the question of how children process communication and what cognitive effort is required to do so.
More information about the project
Correctly interpreting the communicative intentions of a speaker is a challenge that children constantly face in everyday life. For example, if a child asks his mother whether she can still eat cookies and the mother answers that dinner is coming, the child must infer the mother's intention. Such indirect statements (like the mother's in the example) present children with particular difficulties compared to direct statements (the mother could also deny the request directly by saying no).
The present study investigated which step in the processing of communicative actions might lead to difficulties in understanding indirect communication. We studied 3- and 5-year-old children using eye-tracking and an object choice task. The children watched videos showing puppets performing everyday activities (e.g., caring for pets). For each activity, the puppets were asked which of two objects (e.g., rabbit or dog) they preferred. Puppets responded either directly (e.g., ''I want the rabbit'') or indirectly (e.g., ''I have a carrot''). The results showed that children in the direct communication condition more often selected the object intended by the puppets than in the indirect communication condition, and that 5-year-olds more often selected correctly than 3-year-olds. Thus, the object choice task confirmed the result of previous studies that indirect communication was more difficult to understand.
However, when looking at the processing of the utterance preceding the object choice, we found that this difference occurred only in the context of the actual explicit decision for an object. Implicit measures (such as pupil dilation and gaze patterns prior to the actual object choice) showed no differences between direct and indirect communication. This suggests that children intuitively understand indirect communication correctly at first and that differences between direct and indirect communication only become apparent in the explicit decision or reaction process.
Related publications:
Schulze, C., & Buttelmann, D. (2021). Children understand communication intuitively, but indirect communication makes them think twice—Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 206, 105105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105105