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Children’s Demonstrative Comprehension and the Role of Non-linguistic Cognitive Abilities: A Cross-Linguistic Study

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Abstract

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children’s own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349–367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child Lang 5(3):457–475, 1978). In the current study, we examined children’s comprehension of demonstratives in English (this and that) and Mandarin Chinese (zhe and na) in order to test the hypothesis that children’s non-adult-like demonstrative comprehension is related to their still-developing non-linguistic cognitive abilities supporting perspective-taking, including Theory of Mind and Executive Function. Testing 3 to 6-year-old children on a set of demonstrative comprehension tasks and assessments of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, our findings revealed that children’s successful demonstrative comprehension is related to their development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, for both of the language groups. These findings suggest that the development of deictic expressions like demonstratives may be related to the development of non-linguistic cognitive abilities, regardless of the language that the children are acquiring.

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Notes

  1. An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the distal demonstrative may not indeed be ‘distal’. Indeed, some scholars categorize the two-way coding of the speaker-referent distinction as ‘proximal’ vs. ‘non-proximal’ (e.g., Ghomeshi et al. 2004). Our focus in the current study is on the parallel in demonstratives in English and Chinese which encode a two-way contrast in speaker-referent distance, and will just refer to the types of demonstratives as ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’.

  2. Zhao (2007) recruited children aged from three to six, but each age group only involved two children. In addition, she did not include in the analysis the data from one of the two children for one age group because the two items located in the workspace, a cookie and a piece of candy, invited preference-based selection from this child.

  3. Recent studies on adults’ demonstrative comprehension also suggest their tendency to be egocentric for comprehending demonstratives (Stevens and Zhang 2013, 2014), and we could also assume that adults’ default setting of perspective is also on their own.

  4. In the Judgment Task, while making efforts to control the discourse so that the use of a demonstrative would be as felicitous as possible without having the speaker’s eye gaze placed on the object being referred to. In the stories used in the Judgment Task, we selected the King and the Servant as two interlocutors, with King serving as the demander/uttering demands with demonstratives, and the Servant serving as the fulfiller/hearing demonstratives uttered by King and responding to his demands with demonstratives. At the beginning of the task, the storyline was presented as a situation where the Servant would be ‘tested’ in terms of how good a servant he is; if he is a good servant, he should be able to figure out which of the objects in the space King wants him to paint, even if the King was not looking at the object when he uttered a demand with a demonstrative (= a test item, e.g., “Paint that cup blue”). This specific story setting was used to control the felicity of the discourse in which demonstratives were uttered without the speaker’s eye gaze cue.

  5. In the current study, children were characterized as yes-biased if they responded “yes” to 4 out of 4 target trials. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, this criterion relies on a relatively small number of trials. While the number of target trials in the current study was limited in order to minimize the length of the experiment, future research including a larger number of trials would allow for a more precise characterization of yes-bias among the child participants.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Robert Fiorentino, Alison Gabriele, Lamar Hunt III, and all the members of the Research in Acquisition and Processing Group at the University of Kansas for their discussions regarding the design of the study. Special thanks to Yu-Ping Hsu for drawing the pictures used in the Judgment Task and the DCCS, to Rachael Brown, Gretchen Hess, Adrienne M. Johnson and Yu-Li Chung for their help in data collection, and to Caitlin Coughlin for her help in analyzing the data. We would also like to express our gratitude to the children, parents and staff in the following preschools for their participation: Children’s Learning Center, Hilltop Child Development Center, Montessori Children’s House of Lawrence, and Stepping Stones, Inc., in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Concordia Middle School Preschool and Singang Township Preschool in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Speech and Hearing Science Research Institute, Children’s Hearing Foundation, 4F, No. 60, Zhouzi St., Taipei City, 114, Taiwan

    Chia-Ying Chu

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas, 1541 Lilac Lane, Blake Hall Room 427, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Chia-Ying Chu & Utako Minai

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Appendix

Appendix

  1. I.

    Linguistic stimuli used in the Act-out Task: Experimenter’s act-out instruction

English

  1. 1.

    Put Pooh in this box.

  2. 2.

    Put Rabbit in that box.

  3. 3.

    Put Piglet in this box.

  4. 4.

    Put Owl in that box.

  5. 5.

    Put Kangaroo in that box.

  6. 6.

    Put Eeyore in this box.

Mandarin Chinese

(Notes on gloss: \(\hbox {BA}= \hbox {the morpheme required for a demanding sentence}\); \(\hbox {CL}= \hbox {a classifier}\))

figure c
  1. II.

    Linguistic stimuli used in the Judgement Task: the King’s painting demands

English

  1. 1.

    Paint this plate blue.

  2. 2.

    Paint this bowl blue.

  3. 3.

    Paint this pot blue.

  4. 4.

    Paint this clock blue.

  5. 5.

    Paint that pillow blue.

  6. 6.

    Paint that cup blue.

  7. 7.

    Paint that bag blue.

  8. 8.

    Paint that box blue.

Mandarin Chinese

(Notes on gloss: \(\hbox {BA}= \hbox {the morpheme required for a demanding sentence}\); \(\hbox {CL}= \hbox {a classifier}\))

figure d

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Chu, CY., Minai, U. Children’s Demonstrative Comprehension and the Role of Non-linguistic Cognitive Abilities: A Cross-Linguistic Study. J Psycholinguist Res 47, 1343–1368 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9565-8

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