That’s not the One I Wanted: Feedback Improves 5-Year-olds’ Communicative Perspective-Taking

Effective communication requires participants to recognize what knowledge is shared and what knowledge remains unique to each person. Although research has examined the developmental emergence of this communicative skill, it is unclear how children’s attention to shared knowledge is impacted by corrective feedback. Constraint-based models of language processing suggest that listeners simultaneously consider and weigh cues during language comprehension; however, it is unclear to what extent (and when) children use feedback from a communicative partner, relative to other salient cues such as linguistic match, during comprehension. This study addresses this gap by examining whether corrective feedback affects the time course and outcome of Canadian 5-year-olds’ (<i>n</i> = 64) use of shared knowledge to guide interpretation of a speaker’s referential intent. Children who received feedback on the accuracy of their interpretations pointed to target objects more than those who did not receive feedback. Children in the feedback group showed preferential looking toward the target (relative to a competitor), with this effect emerging at later stages of sentence processing. Children’s working memory capacity was positively associated with greater fixation on the target object during trials that required perspective-taking, only if they had received feedback on their previous choices.