The influences of discourse and perceptual factors on Mandarin-speaking children’s verbal and non-verbal referential acts

Previous research has shown that children’s referential choices are influenced by pragmatic factors in discourse (e.g., prior mention) and perceptual contexts (e.g., joint attention). However, most studies focused primarily on the verbal modality, with relatively little attention paid to children’s multimodal referential competence. To address this gap, the present study examined Mandarin-speaking children’s verbal and non-verbal referential acts in relation to the discourse factor, prior mention, and the perceptual factor, joint attention, during early childhood, with the aim of elucidating children’s increasing sensitivity to these discourse-pragmatic factors and their developing communicative ability. The dataset comprised 12 hours of natural conversations between Mandarin-speaking mother–child dyads. Children’s referential choices of the modalities and expressions were analyzed in terms of the two pragmatic factors (i.e., prior mention and joint attention). The results indicate that, from the earliest stage observed, children systematically differentiated newly introduced and previously mentioned referents in the modalities and referential expressions. They provided more information for new referents involved in joint attention via cross-modal referential acts, while relying on verbally informative expressions for new referents when joint attention was absent; conversely, previously mentioned referents were typically expressed with verbally reduced forms and usually without accompanying non-verbal acts. Cross-modal acts consistently served to identify new referents with joint attention in children’s usage across developmental stages and interactional contexts. Taken together, these findings suggest that children’s referential choices in both modalities reflect their emerging communicative and pragmatic abilities. This study advances understanding of Mandarin-speaking children’s multimodal referential ability by demonstrating how they integrate multimodal expressions of reference and how their non-verbal acts evolve alongside speech as they become more linguistically proficient.