Common ground without copresence: Preschoolers apply indirect cues about shared knowledge in real-time referential interpretation

Abstract

We examined whether, in the absence of physical cues about a speaker’s visual perspective, 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 46) children would use their beliefs about the speaker’s knowledge state to guide real-time referential interpretation. Using a modified version of the visual world paradigm where a speaker provided referential instructions remotely from a different room from the child listener, children learned that some images on their display (i.e., items that appeared on top of blue cards) could not be seen on the speaker’s display (i.e., the speaker saw a blank blue card only). Results indicated that children identified a target referent faster and more accurately when they believed they had privileged access to a competitor object in a visual display versus when they believed this competitor was also known to the speaker. These findings indicate that preschoolers do not require the co-presence of a speaker or immediate line-of-sight cues to rapidly integrate perspective information during real-time language processing. Overall, the findings provide new insights into the different types of perspective cues that children use to guide language understanding, as well as the time course and magnitude of their effects.