Arvidsson Caroline, Pagmar David, Uddén Julia
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Nov 30;9(11):220305. doi: 10.1098/rsos.220305. eCollection 2022 Nov.
The ability to adapt utterances to the world knowledge of one's addressee is undeniably ubiquitous in human social cognition, but its development and association with other cognitive mechanisms during adolescence have not been studied. In an online production task, we measured the ability of children entering adolescence (ages 11-12, = 11.8, ) and adolescents (ages 15-16, = 15.9, ) to tailor referential expressions in accordance with the inferred world knowledge of their addressee-an ability we refer to as world knowledge-based audience design (AD). A post-test survey showed that both age groups held similar assumptions about the addressees' knowledge of referents, but the younger age group did not consistently adapt their utterances in accordance with these assumptions during online production, resulting in a significantly improved AD behaviour across age groups. We also investigated the reliance of AD on executive functions (EF). Executive functioning (as reflected by performance on the Wisconsin card sorting task) increased significantly with age, but did not explain the age-related increase in AD performance. We thus provide evidence in support of an adolescent development of world knowledge-based AD over and above development of EF.
在人类社会认知中，根据听话人的世界知识调整话语的能力无疑是普遍存在的，但在青春期，这种能力的发展以及它与其他认知机制的关联尚未得到研究。在一项在线表达任务中，我们测量了即将步入青春期的儿童（11 - 12岁，平均年龄 = 11.8岁，标准差 = ）和青少年（15 - 16岁，平均年龄 = 15.9岁，标准差 = ）根据对听话人推断出的世界知识来调整指称表达的能力——我们将这种能力称为基于世界知识的受众设计（AD）。一项测试后调查显示，两个年龄组对听话人关于所指对象的知识持有相似的假设，但较年轻的年龄组在在线表达过程中并未始终如一地根据这些假设调整他们的话语，这导致各年龄组的AD行为有显著改善。我们还研究了AD对执行功能（EF）的依赖程度。执行功能（通过威斯康星卡片分类任务的表现反映）随年龄显著增加，但并不能解释AD表现中与年龄相关的增长。因此，我们提供了证据支持基于世界知识的AD在青春期的发展超越了EF的发展。
