The relations between children’s communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning

2008/09/22 by E NILSEN, Elizabeth S. Nilsen, S GRAHAM +1 · 288 citations
Psychology · #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognition #Cognitive flexibility #Cognitive psychology #Comprehension #Computer science #Control (management) #Developmental psychology #Empathy #Executive functions #Flexibility (engineering) #Inhibitory control #Language Development and Disorders #Linguistics #Perspective (graphical) #Perspective-taking #Psychology #Social psychology #Task (project management) #Working memory

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.07.002

published in Cognitive Psychology 58(2), 220-249 (Elsevier BV)

openalex publication_date 2008/09/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Two experiments investigated children's communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document children's emergent use of the perspective of their speaking partner to guide their communicative behaviors in both a production and comprehension task. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-old children used a speaker's perspective to guide their interpretation of instructions. In both experiments, egocentric interpretations of speaker requests were negatively correlated with children's inhibitory control skills. Results of these studies demonstrate that young children can differentiate between information that is accessible to the speaker versus privileged knowledge, and use this information to guide their communicative behaviors. Furthermore, the results suggest that children's inhibitory control skills allow them to inhibit their own perspective, enabling them to make use of their communicative partner's perspective.

Citations

• The Unity and Diversity of Executive Functions and Their Contributions to Complex “Frontal Lobe” Tasks: A Latent Variable Analysis
• Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception

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