The Speaker and Addressee Reference in Children: Relation to the Linguistic and Social-cognitive Development

Abstrakt

Speaker/addressee reference in toddlers displays at least two peculiarities: the use of the third person (name, mommy) and pronoun reversals (me refers to the adult and you refers to the self), which occur in children with autism as well as typically developing children. Various factors were proposed to affect this area during acquision (Dale & Crain-Thoreson, 1993), including linguistic and social development, but the two have rarely been examined together in one predictive model.

Our study examined how children's mastery of 1st/2nd person pronoun reference relates to language development and development of social cognition. Our participants were 66 Czech typically developing 2.5-year-olds.

Social understanding was assessed using tasks examining visual perspective, pretense and intention understanding. A PPVT-like task and TROG (Bishop, 2003) were used as measures of language development.

Five other tasks addressed pronoun production and comprehension. In the most general regression model, we aggregated the three social scores into one factor.

We did the same with the two linguistic scores and the five scores for pronouns. We observed significant independent effects of the social (t=3.022, p<0.001, ΔR2=0.107) as well as the linguistic (t=4.799, p<0.001, ΔR2=0.270) development on pronoun reference.

Similar result held for separate production of pronouns. For comprehension, only linguistic score fitted the model (ling: t=4.381, p<0.001, ΔR2=0.258; soc: t=1.695, p=0.097, ΔR2=0.040).

Models for general pronoun reference and pronoun production contain a linguistic as well as a social predictor, suggesting that both of them have independent effects on the acquisition of 1st/2nd person pronoun reference. However, for correct comprehension, only linguistic advancement seems to play a unique role.