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Updated: Jul 20, 2025
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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
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Five-year-olds' sensitivity to knowledge discrepancies about object identity during online language comprehension
Narae Ju1, Valerie San Juan2, Craig G Chambers3
1Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|July 31, 2023
Summary
Five-year-old children struggle to ignore their own knowledge when processing language, especially when they possess unique information about an object. This difficulty impacts their real-time language comprehension and managing differing perspectives.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Children often encounter communication scenarios where their knowledge differs from their conversational partners.
- Understanding how children manage these knowledge discrepancies is crucial for comprehending real-time language processing.
- Previous research has explored common ground in language, but less is known about managing privileged information.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate 5-year-old children's ability to manage knowledge discrepancies in real-time language comprehension.
- To examine whether children can suppress private knowledge when processing ambiguous language.
- To compare children's ability to manage different types of knowledge discrepancies.
Main Methods:
- A referential communication task was employed with 5-year-old children.
- Experiment 1: Tested children in shared vs. privileged knowledge conditions with visually misleading objects.
- Experiment 2: Contrasted privileged knowledge with a standard common ground scenario.
Main Results:
- Children did not inhibit their private knowledge during early referential interpretation in the privileged knowledge condition.
- Children demonstrated a greater ability to manage discrepancies when the speaker's knowledge was limited (common ground).
- Findings indicate distinct abilities in managing different knowledge discrepancy types during language comprehension.
Conclusions:
- Five-year-olds find it challenging to suppress their own knowledge in real-time language processing.
- The ability to manage knowledge discrepancies depends on the specific nature of the discrepancy.
- This study highlights developmental differences in children's pragmatic language skills and theory of mind.
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