Show or Tell? Preschool-aged children adapt their communication to their partner's auditory access

As adults, we often tailor our communication to others’ auditory access, such as using more gestures in lieu of speech in noisy environments. Yet, assessing the relative effectiveness of different communicative acts based on others’ perceptual access—especially when it differs from one’s own—requires sophisticated mental-state reasoning, which undergoes significant developmental change in early childhood. Can young children tailor how they communicate based on their partners’ auditory access? In Study 1, parents (n=98) reported that most of their children adjust their communicative behaviors in noisy settings by around age 4. In Study 2, we elicited these behaviors in a tightly-controlled experiment, in which 4-year-old children (n=48) taught how a novel toy works to a learner wearing headphones; they were either playing loud music or were silent. When the learner’s auditory access was obstructed, children were more likely to use physical demonstrations to teach the learner and less likely to use verbal explanations; on the other hand, when the learner’s vision and audition were both intact, children were more likely to use verbal instruction and less likely to use physical demonstrations. These findings demonstrate that preschool-aged children can reason about others’ perceptual access across multiple sensory modalities and possess a sophisticated understanding of what does and does not alter others’ auditory access, including factors with an asymmetric effect. Results indicate that children can apply such mental-state reasoning to flexibly communicate with others, which likely supports their ability to communicate successfully across perceptually-compromised contexts and individuals.