Children who lose the thread of an otherwise obvious conversation often do so because they can't combine two key skills until late in their development.
According to a study done by the University of Cambridge, children as young as five or six have difficulty with perspective. Children may not be able to read between the lines of a seemingly straightforward conversation if their frames of reference are different. If they know something the adult doesn't, for example, if they are talking by video call or on the phone, or if they are in different rooms, this will happen.
In a situation in which the speaker knows which hat they mean, a child may find it difficult to process a simple request, such as: "pass me the blue hat". A skill children seem not to acquire until late in their development is combining their understanding of what the speaker can see with the challenge of identifying the object most clearly implied by the request.
Our understanding of how children master implicatures has been changed.
We do this all the time to understand and respond appropriately to others. If a person is asked what they had for lunch, they might say a sandwich, even if technically they had more. After hearing the statement "your cat and dog went to the vet, but the cat is fine", we may justifiably fear for the dog's life.
Three years of age is when children begin to comprehend. They only apply if they share the speaker's view. A child twice their age may struggle to formulate an appropriate response if what they can see is at odds with what the speaker says.
Dr. Elspeth Wilson is from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. A five-year-old can make an inference and take another's perspective in a different way, but combine them and it becomes too difficult. The majority of the children in our study had trouble with it.
When children fail to get what adults mean, it may not just be because they don't understand the words. The context of a conversation can be too complicated for children to understand.
The study focused on a particular group of implicatures, known as "quantity implicatures", which arise when a speaker gives limited information on the assumption the listener will understand the rest.
The researchers created an experiment in which 33 five and six year olds had a conversation with a puppet manipulated by an adult. The child and adult sat next to each other. The puppet asked the child to pick a card with apples on it, for example, by saying: "Give me the card with apples on it".
The catch was there. The child and puppet could always see a card with the requested image and something else, but in some cases the child could see a better match which the puppet could not. The child could see a card only featuring apples, while the puppet could see a card with apples and bananas. The speaker described the card with apples as a good description. The child had to consider what the puppet couldn't see, and choose a card with only apples on it.
Even though they managed capably in other scenarios, 29 children failed this test. Nine out of 36 people failed the test. There was a follow-up experiment with 25 more children.
It's possible that children are trying to integrate implicature and perspective-taking but struggle to reconcile them. They might have been trying to correct the situation on the speaker's behalf if they had responded with the correct strategy.
The findings about children's development could eventually be important for clinical professionals. The challenge of combining implicatures and perspective-taking is still a challenge for children at age five or six, so primary school teachers could play a role in helping younger children to develop these important skills.
Wilson said that the more we know about children's linguistic and communicative development, the better we can support that development at school and in the home.
The research is published in a journal.
More information: Elspeth Wilson et al, The Role of Perspective-Taking in Children's Quantity Implicatures, Language Learning and Development (2022). DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2022.2050236
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