In:The Acquisition of Reference
Edited by Ludovica Serratrice and Shanley E.M. Allen
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 15] 2015
► pp. 263–283
The cognitive underpinnings of referential abilities
Published online: 25 November 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.15.11dec
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.15.11dec
The aim of the chapter is to take stock and bring together fields of enquiry relevant to the investigation of preschool children’s referential abilities. After an appraisal of the evidence as to what adults’ referential abilities really are, the key cognitive prerequisites for unhindered performance in experimental tasks assessing referential abilities are identified. An estimation of when these cognitive prerequisites are in place in young children is then provided, on the basis of a review of the relevant developmental psychology literature. This leads to concrete predictions as to the emergence of referential abilities in preschool children, upon which one can define a programme of research to progress our understanding of children’s referential abilities.
References (86)
Aichhorn, M., Perner, J., Kronbichler, M., Staffen, W., & Ladurner, G. (2006). Do visual perspective tasks need theory of mind? Neuroimage, 30, 1059–1068.
Almor, A., & Nair, V.A. (2007). The form of referential expressions in discourse. Language and Linguistic Compass, 1, 84–99.
Arnold, J. (2001). The effect of thematic roles on pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation. Discourse Processes, 31, 137–162.
. (2010). How speakers refer: The role of accessibility. Language and Linguistic Compass, 4, 187–203.
Arnold, J., & Griffin, Z. (2007). The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 521–536.
Arnold, J., & Tanenhaus, M. (2011). Disfluency effects in comprehension: How new information can become accessible. In N. Perlmutter & E. Gibson (Eds.), The processing and acquisition of reference (pp. 197–217). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The autism-spectrum quotient: Evidence from Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists, and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 5–17.
Bialystok, E. (1986). Factors in the growth of linguistic awareness. Child Development, 57, 498–510.
. (1999). Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development, Volume 70, 636–644.
Bialystok, E., & Martin, M. (2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the developmental change card sort task. Developmental Science, 7, 325–339.
Blades, M., & Cooke, Z. (1994). Young children’s ability to understand a model as a spatial representation. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 115, 201–218.
Brown-Schmidt, S. (2009). The role of executive function in perspective-taking during on-line language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 16, 893–900.
Carlson, S., Claxton, L., & Moses, L. (2015). The relation between executive function and theory of mind is more than skin deep. Journal of Cognition and Development, 16, 186–197.
Carlson, S., & Meltzoff, A. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282–298.
Carlson, S., & Moses, L.J. (2001). Individual differences in inhibitory control and children’s theory of mind. Child Development, 72, 1032–1053.
Cattanach, A. (2008). Narrative approaches in play with children. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Clark, H., & Marshall, C. (1981). Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In A.K. Joshi, B. Webber, & I. Sag (Eds.), Elements of discourse understanding (pp. 10–63). Cambridge: CUP.
De Cat, C. (2009). Experimental evidence for preschoolers’ mastery of “topic”. Language Acquisition, 16, 224–239.
. (2011). Information tracking and encoding in early L1: Linguistic competence vs. cognitive limitations. Journal of Child Language, 38, 828–860.
. (2013). Egocentric definiteness errors and perspective evaluation in preschool children. Journal of Pragmatics, 56, 58–69.
DeLoache, J., & Burns, N. (1994). Early understanding of the representational function of pictures. Cognition, 52, 83–110.
Doherty, M.J. (2009). Theory of mind. How children understand others’ thoughts and feelings. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Doherty, M.J., & Wimmer, M.C. (2005). Children’s understanding of ambiguous figures: Which cognitive developments are necessary to experience reversal? Cognitive Development, 20, 407–421.
Epley, N., Morewedge, C., & Keysar, B. (2004). Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 760–768.
Flavell, J., Botkin, P., Fry, C., Wright, J., & Jarvis, D. (1968). The development of role-taking and communication skills in children. New York: Wiley.
Freeman, N.H., Lewis, C., & Doherty, M.J. (1991). Preschoolers’ grasp of a desire for knowledge in false-belief prediction: Practical intelligence and verbal report. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 139–157.
Friedman, N., Miyake, A., Corley, R., Young, S., DeFries, J., & Hewitt, J. (2006). Not all executive functions are related to intelligence. Psychological Science, 17, 172–179.
Fukumura, K., & Van Gompel, R. (2011). The effects of animacy in the choice of referring expressions. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 1472–1504.
. (2012). Producing pronouns and definite noun phrases: Do speakers use the addressee’s discourse model? Cognitive Science, 36, 1289–1311.
Ganea, P.A., Allen, M.L., Butler, L., Carey, S., & DeLoache, J.S. (2009). Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104, 283–295.
Garon, N., Bryson, S., & Smith, I. (2008). Executive function in preschoolers: A review using an integrative framework. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 31–60.
Garrod, S. (2011). Referential processing in monologue and dialogue with and without access to real-world referents. In N. Perlmutter & E. Gibson (Eds.), The processing and acquisition of reference (pp. 273–293). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gathercole, S. (1998). The development of memory. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 39, 3–27.
Grodner, D., Dalini, M., Pearlstein-Levy, S., & Ward, A. (2012). Factors that contribute to the use of perspective in referent identification (Paper presented at the City University of New York conference on human sentence processing).
Grosse, G., Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2010). 21-month-olds understand the cooperative logic of requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3377–3383.
Gundel, J. (2009). Children’s use of referring expressions: What can it tell us about theory of mind? Cognitive Critique, 1, 73–100.
. (2011). Child language, theory of mind, and the role of procedural markers in identifying referents of nominal expressions. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 205–231). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Gundel, J., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69, 274–307.
Heller, D., Grodner, D., & Tanenhaus, M.K. (2009). The real-time use of information about common ground in restricting domains of reference. In U. Sauerland & K. Yatsushiro (Eds.), Semantics and pragmatics. From experiment to theory (pp. 228–248).
Hendriks, P. ( in press). Optimal acquisition: Why children’s language production can exceed their comprehension.
Proceedings of GALA 2013
.
Hendriks, P., de Hoop, H., Krämer, I., de Swart, H., & Zwarts, J. (2010). Conflicts in interpretation. London: Equinox.
Henning, A., Spinath, F., & Aschersleben, G. (2010). The link between preschoolers’ executive function and theory of mind and the role of epistemic states. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108, 513–531.
Hickmann, M. (2000). Le développement de l’organisation discursive. In M. Kail & M. Fayol (Eds.), Acquisition du langage volume 2: Le langage en développement (Vol. 2, pp. 83–115). Paris: PUF.
Hogrefe, G., Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1986). Ignorance versus false belief: A developmental lag in attribution of epistemic states. Child Development, 57, 567–582.
Hongwanishkul, D., Happaney, K.R., Lee, W., & Zelazo, P.D. (2005). Hot and cool executive function: Age-related changes and individual differences. Developmental Neuropsychology, 28, 617–644.
Hughes, C., & Ensor, R. (2007). Executive function and theory of mind: Predictive relations from ages 2 to 4. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1447–1459.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: CUP.
. (1985). Language and cognitive process from a developmental perspective. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1, 65–85.
Keysar, B., Barr, D., Balin, J., & Bruauner, J. (2000). Taking perspective in conversation: The role of mutual knowledge in comprehension. Psychological Science, 11, 32–38.
Keysar, B., Lin, S., & Barr, D. (2003). Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition, 89, 25–41.
Kidd, E., Stewart, A., & Serratrice, L. (2011). Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden-path recovery. Journal of Child Language, 38, 222–234.
Lempers, J., Flavell, E., & Flavell, J. (1977). The development in very young children of tacit knowledge concerning visual perception. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 95, 3–53.
Liszkowski, U., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Twelve-month-olds communicate helpfully and appropriately for knowledgeable and ignorant partners. Cognition, 108, 732–739.
Martin-Rhee, M., & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 81–93.
Marvin, R., Greenberg, M., & Mossler, D. (1976). The early development of conceptual perspective taking: Distinguishing among multiple perspectives. Child Development, 47, 511–514.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2006). The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children’s use of referring expressions. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 403–422.
Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106, 3–19.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N., Emerson, M., Witzki, A., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49–100.
Moll, H., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Two- and 3-year-olds know what others have and have not heard. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15, 12–21.
Moll, H., & Kadipasaoglu, D. (2013). The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, article 588.
Moll, H., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2011). How does it look? Level 2 perspective-taking at 36 months of age. Child Development, 82, 661–673.
Moses, L., & Tahiroglu, D. (2010). Clarifying the relation between executive function and children’s theories of mind. In J. Carpendale, G. Iarocci, U. Mueller, B. Sokol, & A. Young (Eds.), Self- and social-regulation: Exploring the relations between social interaction, social cognition, and the development of executive functions (pp. 218–233). Oxford: OUP.
Mundy, P., Block, J., Delgado, C., Pomares, Y., Hecke, A.V.V., & Parlade, M.V. (2007). Individual differences and the development of joint attention in infancy. Child Development, 78, 938–954.
Nadig, A., & Sedivy, J.C. (2002). Evidence of perspective-taking constratins in children’s on-ine reference resolution. Psychological Science, 13, 329–336.
Newcombe, N., & Huttenlocher, J. (2000). Making space: The development of spatial representation and reasoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nilsen, E., & Graham, S. (2009). The relations between children’s communicative perspective-taking and executive function. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 220-249.
Perner, J. (2000). Theory of mind. In M. Bennett (Ed.), Developmental psychology: Achievements and prospects. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1948). The child’s conception of space. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pickering, M.J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169–226.
Reinhart, T. (1981). Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica, 27, 53–94.
Rothbart, M., & Posner, M. (2001). Mechanism and variation in the development of attentional networks. In C. Nelson & M. Luciana (Eds.), Handbook of developmental cognitive neuroscience (pp. 353–363). Cambridge: CUP.
Rueda, M.R., Posner, M.I., & Rothbart, M.K. (2005). The development of executive attention: Contributions to the emergence of self-regulation. Developmental Neuropsychology, 28, 573–594.
Salomo, D., Graf, E., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2011). The role of perceptual availability and discourse context in young children’s question answering. Journal of Child Language, 38, 918–931.
Schaeffer, J., & Matthewson, L. (2005). Grammar and pragmatics in the acquisition of article systems. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 23, 53–101.
Schafer, R., & de Villiers, J. (2000). Imagining articles: What a and the can tell us about the emergence of DP. In S.C. Howell, S. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of BUCLD 24 (pp. 609–620). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1974). Pragmatic presuppositions. In M.K. Munitz & P.K. Unger (Eds.), Semantics and philosophy (pp. 197–213). New York: New York University Press.
Trueswell, J.C., Papafragou, A., & Choi, Y. (2011). Referential and syntactic processes: What develops? In N. Perlmutter & E. Gibson (Eds.), The processing and acquisition of reference (pp. 65–108). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
van Rij, J. (2012). Pronoun processing: Computational, behavioral, and psychophysiological studies in children and adults (Vol. 108). Groningen: Groningen Dissertations in Linguistics.
Vogels, J., Krahmer, E., & Maes, A. (2013a). Cognitive load does not decrease pronoun use when speaker’s and addressee’s perspectives are dissociated. In
Proceedings of COGSCI 2013
(pp. 3681–3868).
. (2013b). Who is where referred to how, and why? The influence of visual saliency on referent accessibility in spoken language production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 1323–1349.
Weighall, A.R. (2008). The kindergarten path effect revisited: Children’s use of context in processing structural ambiguities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 99, 75–95.
Wimmer, & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.
Zelazo, P.D., Qu, L., & Müller, U. (2005). Hot and cool aspects of executive function: Relations in early development. In W. Schneider, R. Schumann-Hengsteler, & B. Sodian (Eds.), Young children’s cognitive development: Interrelationships among executive functioning, working memory, verbal ability, and theory of mind (pp. 71–93). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cited by (25)
Cited by 25 other publications
Iñigo-Mora, Isabel
Sopata, Aldona, Esther Rinke & Cristina Flores
Vogelzang, Margreet & Jacopo Torregrossa
Daskalaki, Evangelia, Vasiliki Chondrogianni & Elma Blom
Vasil, Jared
Wilson, Elspeth, Rebecca Lawrence & Napoleon Katsos
Argus, Reili & Andra Kütt
Gagarina, Natalia & Ute Bohnacker
Lindgren, Josefin, Valerie Reichardt & Ute Bohnacker
Vogels, Jorrig & Josefin Lindgren
Marcos, Haydée, Anne Salazar Orvig, Christine da Silva-Genest & Julien Heurdier
2021. The influence of dialogue in young children’s uses of referring
expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 203 ff.
Peeters, David, Emiel Krahmer & Alfons Maes
Salazar Orvig, Anne & Geneviève de Weck
2021. The acquisition of referring expressions: From formal factors to communicative experience. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 319 ff.
Salazar-Orvig, Anne & Geneviève de Weck
2021. Chapter 11. The acquisition of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28],
Salazar Orvig, Anne, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan & Annie Rialland
2021. A dialogical approach to the acquisition and usage of referring
expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 1 ff.
Salazar-Orvig, Anne, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan & Annie Rialland
2021. Chapter 1. A dialogical approach to the acquisition and usage of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28],
Sopata, Aldona, Kamil Długosz, Bernhard Brehmer & Raina Gielge
Torregrossa, Jacopo, Maria Andreou, Christiane Bongartz & Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Andreou, Maria, Jacopo Torregrossa & Christiane Maria Bongartz
Serratrice, Ludovica & Cécile De Cat
Fichman, Sveta & Carmit Altman
MEGHERBI, Hakima, Alix SEIGNEURIC, Jane OAKHILL & Steve BUENO
DAVIES, Catherine & Helene KREYSA
Salazar-Orvig, Anne, Haydée Marcos, Julien Heurdier & Christine da Silva-Genest
2018. Referential features, speech genres and activity types. In Sources of variation in first language acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 22], ► pp. 219 ff.
Zufferey, Sandrine
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
