Children's referential communication skills: The role of cognitive abilities and adult models of speech

Referential communication is effective when speakers describe a specific entity in a way that leads to accurate identification of that referent among competitors. Young children's initial referential expressions are often inadequate, and this state of miscommunication needs to be repaired in subsequent communicative attempts. Exposure to adults' effective descriptions of referents is beneficial for children to develop referentially clear initial descriptions. Here, we examined whether adult models of speech also provide benefits for children's communicative repair behavior. Furthermore, we assessed the relation between children's cognitive abilities and referential communication skills. We tested 59 children (aged 4 years to 5 years 9 months) on their ability to request specific stickers among similar distractors in a pretest-modeling-posttest design. In the modeling phase, 30 children heard more informative descriptions of stickers with relative clauses (e.g., “you selected the horse that the boy is riding”) and 29 children heard less informative descriptions with demonstrative noun phrases (e.g., “you selected that horse”). In a second session, we measured children's short-term memory, executive functions (working memory and cognitive flexibility), and theory of mind. Children who heard more informative expressions showed a greater increase in uniquely identifying initial descriptions than children who heard less informative expressions. Hearing more informative expressions did not provide an additional benefit in repairing ambiguous messages, an ability we found to be related to cognitive flexibility and memory. Results indicate that informative language structures that uniquely identify referents provide limited benefits to children for effective communication where children's short-term memory and executive functions also matter.