2018 Friday Poster 6652

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Language, Personal Pronouns, and Social Understanding from Two to Three: a Longitudinal Study in Children Acquiring Czech
A. Chromá, F. Smolík

Language development is an important predictor of false-belief understanding, which emerges at about 4 years of age (e. g. Milligan et al., 2007). Links between language and social understanding can be shown earlier: person-referring pronouns are of special interest. Differentiating persons in language may relate to social cognition, since the person-referring pronouns require a stable representation of self and others. At the same time, pronouns are closed-class elements that may depend on sufficient development of grammatical skills (cf. Naigles et al., 2016, Markova & Smolík 2014).

We conducted a two-round longitudinal study examining linguistic development, several aspects of social cognition, and the mastery of speaker and addressee (I/You) reference in Czech toddlers. The key questions were: 1) Is early use of person-referring devices related to social cognition and linguistic development? 2) Does early use of these person-referring elements predict the performance in later social-cognitive tasks, above and beyond the early language skills?

The children were 29 months (28 to 32) in the first round, and 43 months (42 to 47) in the second round. At the time of abstract submission, 49 children participated in both rounds (out of 66 seen at the first round). Five tasks addressed person reference in production and comprehension at 29 months; and one task at 43 months. Social cognition at 29 months was assessed with tasks examining visual perspective, pretense and intention understanding. At 43 months, social cognition was assessed by a false-belief task and two visual perspective tasks. At both ages, linguistic development was assessed by a picture-comprehension lexical task and a receptive grammar task (Bishop, 2003); at 29 months, MLU values were also available.

The results were analyzed using regression analyses and path analysis, first examining the overall patterns using aggregate scores for language, social cognition, and linguistic person reference (see Table 1). A path model (see Figure 1) confirmed that person reference is related to both social cognition and language development at 29 months. The model showed predictive effects of language on later social cognition, and no effect of early social cognition on later general language. Early person reference was positively related to later person reference, but not to language or social cognition.

Interestingly, the early language performance had a negative relation to later mastery of person reference. Subsequent regression analyses showed that each of the second-round social understanding tasks (false belief and visual perspective tasks) was significantly related to the first-round language scores.

Our results show that person reference at 29 months is related to both social-cognitive and linguistic development. At 43 months, the relation to social cognition is no longer present, perhaps because person reference is well mastered. Person reference at 43 months is positively related to earlier person reference, and negatively related to earlier language skills. This probably reflects the loosening relation between person reference and general language skills in the fourth year of life. Additionally, our results support the finding that early linguistic development predicts later false-belief understanding, and extend this conclusion to visual perspective taking.

References

Bishop, D. V. M. (2003). Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2). Pearson Assessment.

Markova, G. & Smolík, F. (2014). What Do You Think? The Relationship Between Person Reference and Communication About the Mind in Toddlers. Social Development, 23(1), 61–79.

Milligan, K., Astington, J. W. & Dack, L. A. (2007). Language and Theory of Mind: Meta-Analysis of the Relation Between Language Ability and False-belief Understanding. Child Development, 78(2), 622–646.

Naigles, L. R., Cheng, M., Rattanasone, N., Tek, S., Khetrapal, N., Fein, D. & Demuth, K. (2016). “You’re telling me!” The prevalence and predictors of pronoun reversals in children with autism spectrum disorders and typical development. Research in Autism spectrum disorders, 27, 11–20.