Running Head: Demonstratives and Cognitive ...

Running Head: Demonstratives and Cognitive Development

Children’s demonstrative comprehension and the role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities: a cross-linguistic study

Chia-Ying Chu 1 Utako Minai 2

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Corresponding to: Utako Minai 1541 Lilac Lane, Blake Hall Room 406, Lawrence, KS 66045 USA +1-785-864-1559 (phone) +1-785-864-5724 (fax) [email protected] (email)

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Speech and Hearing Science Research Institute, Children’s Hearing Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA 1

Running Head: Demonstratives and Cognitive Development

Children’s demonstrative comprehension and the role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities: a cross-linguistic study

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Abstract

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children’s own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb & Abrahamson, 1976; Clark & Sengul, 1978). In the current study, we examined children’s comprehension of demonstratives in English (this and that) and Mandarin Chinese (zhe and na) in order to test the hypothesis that children’s non-adult-like demonstrative comprehension is related to their still-developing non-linguistic cognitive abilities supporting perspective-taking, including Theory of Mind and Executive Function. Testing 3 to 6-year-old children on a set of demonstrative comprehension tasks and assessments of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, our findings revealed that children’s successful demonstrative comprehension is related to their development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, for both of the language groups. These findings suggest that the development of deictic expressions like demonstratives may be related to the development of non-linguistic cognitive abilities, regardless of the language that the children are acquiring.

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1. Introduction Children acquire their first language while their non-linguistic cognitive abilities are still developing. Therefore, it is essential to understand whether and to what extent children’s language development interacts with their non-linguistic cognitive development. We address this issue by investigating preschool-age children’s interpretation of demonstratives. Demonstratives are deictic expressions, and their successful interpretation requires consideration of the perspective of the speaker of the utterances containing these words. Thus, children need to develop their ability to incorporate the speaker’s perspective into their demonstrative interpretation, as well as to learn the linguistic meaning of those words. Children’s demonstrative comprehension, in light of its possible interaction with their non-linguistic ability to integrate the speaker’s perspective appropriately, thus provides a fertile research domain in which the language-cognition interface in first language acquisition can be assessed. In the current paper, we address this issue cross-linguistically, focusing on the English demonstratives, e.g., this and that, and the Mandarin Chinese demonstratives, e.g., zhe (‘this’) and na (‘that’), which are spatial deictic expressions whose interpretation is directly related to the spatial distance between the speaker and the entity that is being mentioned in the speaker’s utterance. The present study investigates whether the interpretation of demonstratives by children acquiring English and those acquiring Mandarin Chinese is related to the development of non-linguistic cognitive abilities, in particular, Theory of Mind and Executive Function. By investigating demonstrative comprehension in both English and Mandarin Chinese, we are also able to examine to what extent the development of demonstrative comprehension is similar across languages in which demonstratives are realized differently.

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2. Demonstratives in English and Mandarin Chinese Demonstratives, argued to be language universal (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1996; Diessel, 2006), are spatial deictic expressions, which are used to point to a location, or a referent in a particular location, relative to the deictic center. In the current study, we focus on the exophoric use of demonstratives (Levinson, 2003), i.e., when demonstratives are used to pick out a concrete referent in a given context (e.g., Diessel, 1999; Kemmerer, 1999). When used exophorically, demonstratives typically identify a referent in the context, designating a speaker-referent distance based on the speaker’s orientation point/ perspective. In the current study, we will examine children’s comprehension of demonstratives, cross-linguistically for the first time, taking English and Mandarin Chinese as the languages of research. In the demonstratives in English and Mandarin Chinese, the speaker-referent distance is encoded in a two-way contrast: proximal or distal 1. The proximal demonstrative this/zhe points to an entity located in a proximal distance from the speaker, while the distal demonstrative that/na points to an entity located in a distant position from the speaker in a given context. The proximal-distal contrast that determines which of the demonstratives should be used in a given context is established on the basis of the deictic center, encoded in the speaker’s orientation point. Let us see an example in English which explicitly presents the proximal-distal contrast determined by the orientation point of the speaker; imagine a conversational discourse, in which Speaker A and Speaker B are sitting face-to-face, apart from each other in a room, and a teddy bear is placed in front of each of them. Consider the following conversation between Speaker A and Speaker B as given in (1) below:

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(1) A: I don’t want this teddy bear anymore (pointing at the teddy bear in front of A). Can I have that teddy bear (pointing at the teddy bear in front of B)? B: This one (pointing at the teddy bear in front of B, i.e., the one referred to as ‘that teddy bear’ in A’s utterance above)? But you already have that one (pointing at the teddy bear in front of A, the one referred to as ‘this teddy bear’ in A’s utterance above).

Speaker A used this when referring to the teddy bear in front of her, while she used that when referring to the teddy bear far from her (i.e., the one in front of Speaker B). Speaker B, on the other hand, referred to the teddy bear in front of Speaker A as ‘that teddy bear’, and the one in front of herself as ‘this teddy bear’. Therefore, in order for Speaker B to successfully comprehend Speaker A’s utterances, not only must she know that this is the proximal demonstrative and that is the distal demonstrative, but also that she must take Speaker A’s perspective into consideration, correctly inferring that the near-far distance contrast in Speaker A's utterance was determined on the basis of Speaker A’s orientation point. The same mechanism is applied likewise for Speaker A’s interpretation of this and that when uttered by Speaker B. Theoretical analyses of demonstratives in English agree that (i) this is the demonstrative that picks out a proximal entity, (ii) that is the demonstrative which picks out a distal entity, and (iii) the proximal-distal contrast is determined on the basis of the speaker’s orientation point (e.g., Lyons, 1975; Webb & Abrahamson, 1976; Clark & Sengul, 1978; Murasugi, 1986). Following Wu (2004) who claims that demonstratives in Mandarin Chinese exhibit the same two-way encoding, we assume that the same analysis applies to the demonstratives in Mandarin Chinese, zhe and na. 6

In terms of the morphosyntactic representation, we will adopt the analysis of demonstratives in Ghomeshi, Paul and Wiltschko (2004) based on Abney’s (1987) DPhypothesis, under which demonstratives in English and Mandarin Chinese can be analyzed as a functional category determiner (D). In English, a demonstrative serves as a determiner, which can occupy the position for D, as in (2).

(2) [DP [this]D [NP [rabbit]N]] (Ghomeshi et al., 2004)

In Mandarin Chinese, demonstratives zhe/na can also occupy the D position on par with English. However, in Mandarin Chinese, a demonstrative obligatorily co-occurs with a classifier, a morpheme that indicates the semantic category of the noun denotation that is associated with it (Li & Thompson, 1981; Zhang, 2007). In order to accommodate the obligatory occurrence of classifiers, Tang (1990) analyzed the structure of demonstrative DP phrase in Mandarin Chinese as in (3), where a node Classifier Phrase (ClP) is generated inside the DP, and the head of ClP (Cl) could further accommodate a number word (Num).

(3)

DP D

ClP Cl

Num

NP Cla

XP

N

(Tang, 1990)

In Tang’s analysis, Num is for a lexicalized number word, which co-occurs with a classifier complementarily with a demonstrative (Cla in her analysis is for a lexicalized classifier, although 7

she did not clarify the precise difference between Cla and Cl). In a similar vein, Huang, Li and Li (2009) proposed an analysis of a DP as in (4), in which a number word is the head of its maximal projection NumP dominating ClP and NP.

(4)

DP D

NumP Num

ClP CL

NP N

(Huang, Li & Li, 2009)

Huang et al.’s analysis differs from Tang’s in that they posit a NumP as a node to host the number word occurrence. For our current purpose, given that the number word representation is not within our current scope, we do not intend to commit any discussion evaluating these two analyses. In addition, whereas the presence of a classifier differentiates the structure of the whole DP across English and Mandarin Chinese, we do not examine the role of classifiers in children’s demonstrative comprehension. To make our cross-linguistic examination of demonstratives comparable across English and Mandarin Chinese, we created linguistic stimuli in which the semantic feature of classifier does not interfere with comprehension of demonstratives, as we will discuss below. In sum, whereas demonstratives in Mandarin Chinese are different from those in English in their detailed morphosyntactic representation, demonstratives in these two languages are similar in that they both are represented as a determiner and encode a two-way contrast in the speaker-referent distance. For our current purpose, we will focus on these similarities. On par 8

with English demonstratives, in which this is the proximal demonstrative and that is the distal demonstrative, in Mandarin Chinese, the proximal demonstrative zhe (‘this’) picks out a referent near the speaker, while the distal demonstrative na (‘that’) picks out a referent relatively far away from the speaker. The current study focuses on the similarity of demonstratives in English, this and that, and those in Mandarin Chinese, zhe and na, as exophoric, spatial deictic expressions.

3. Children’s ‘egocentric’ demonstrative comprehension and cognitive development While it has been pointed out that demonstratives are among the first words that children use in their early productions (Clark, 1978; Diessel, 2006), early studies revealed that children’s comprehension of demonstratives is robustly non-adult-like. Webb and Abrahamson’s (1976) comprehension study demonstrated that, whereas 6- and 7-year-old English-acquiring children were able to comprehend English demonstratives in an adult-like way when the speaker and the child shared the same perspective (e.g., the speaker was sitting right next to the child), their comprehension was not adult-like when the speaker was sitting apart from the child and thus did not share the same perspective. For example, when the speaker was sitting apart from the child and asked the child to pick up this bear, the child tended to incorrectly interpret this as referring to the bear close to the child. Webb and Abrahamson claimed that during children’s development of demonstrative comprehension, there is an egocentric stage in which children interpret this and that exclusively based on their own perspective, failing to establish reference points based on perspectives different from their own (see also Glucksberg & Krauss, 1967; Deutsch & Pechman, 1982; Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984; Lloyd, Mann, & Peers, 1998, among others, for children’s egocentrism). Clark and Sengul (1978) also showed that children between the ages 9

of 2 and 5 failed to comprehend demonstratives successfully when the speaker’s orientation point was different from the children’s own. Similar to Webb and Abrahamson (1976), Clark and Sengul (1978) also argued that children’s early demonstrative comprehension tends to be egocentric. In summary, early studies on children’s demonstrative comprehension in English suggest that children’s demonstrative comprehension is non-adult-like and may be vulnerable to children’s tendency to be egocentric (cf., de Villiers & de Villiers, 1974; see Webb & Abrahamson, 1976, for review). Whereas the majority of previous studies reporting children’s egocentric demonstrative comprehension focused on English demonstratives (de Villiers & de Villiers 1974; Webb & Abrahamson, 1976; Clark & Sengul 1978; Tanz 1980; Clark & Amaral 2010), far less is known regarding comprehension of demonstratives by Mandarin Chinese-speaking children. Zhao (2007) is the first study that experimentally examined whether Mandarin Chinese-speaking children also exhibit egocentric demonstrative comprehension. Zhao conducted an act-out-based comprehension study where children were asked to select one of two objects, one of which was located near them and the other located away from them. The experimenter, serving as the speaker of the act-out demand containing a demonstrative (e.g., “I want this. (Could you pick it for me?)”), sat either beside the child, in which the speaker’s perspective is the same as the child’s own, or on the other side of the space, where the speaker’s perspective is different from the child’s own. The results revealed that Mandarin Chinese-speaking preschool children also struggled to successfully comprehend demonstratives when the speaker’s perspective was different from their own. Although there are technical concerns regarding Zhao’s experiment and data analysis 2, the findings are consistent with a view in which children’s demonstrative

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comprehension may be affected by egocentrism across languages, rather than modulating success in demonstrative comprehension only in English. Egocentric demonstrative comprehension has also been reported for languages with three-term demonstratives, such as Turkish. A recent study reported that Turkish-speaking children also exhibited egocentric demonstrative comprehension (Muşlu, 2015). Turkish has three demonstratives, and, importantly, they encode the presence/absence of the addressee’s attention to the referent, as well as the proximal-distal distance contrasts: two distance-encoding demonstratives, i.e., the proximal demonstrative bu and the distal demonstrative o, and the distance-neutral, attention-drawing demonstrative şu (Özyürek, 1998). Importantly, a study on demonstratives in child Turkish sheds light on another important communicative aspect of demonstrative comprehension for which children exhibit difficulty. Küntay and Özyürek (2006) examined 4- and 6-year-old Turkish-acquiring children’s use of demonstratives in conversations, as compared to their use by Turkish-speaking adults. The results show that children’s use of Turkish demonstratives bu and o, in which the distance contrast is encoded, was highly adultlike, while their use of the distance-neutral, attention-drawing demonstrative şu was not yet adult-like at the age of six. These findings suggest that children’s difficulty may be driven by the necessity to appropriately incorporate addressees’ mental status, rather than by distance-contrast establishment. That is, for the appropriate use of attention-encoding demonstratives, like şu in Turkish, children need to understand whether or not the addressee’s attention was allocated to the referent, which requires an understanding of aspects of the addressee’s mental status (Küntay & Özyürek, 2006). The non-adult-like use of the attention-drawing demonstrative in Turkish, thus, suggests that children are not yet able to understand what the addressee’s mental status may be, particularly with respect to whether their attention is allocated onto the referent. 11

4. The present study 4.1. Aims and hypotheses The findings on children’s demonstratives discussed above raise the possibility that their egocentric demonstrative comprehension may be related to their still-developing cognitive abilities required for understanding the speaker’s mental state. De Villiers (2007) and Diessel (2012) pointed out a possibility that one such cognitive ability may be Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is a set of cognitive abilities gradually developing throughout childhood (e.g., Flavell, 2004), which allow one to infer others’ mental status, such as beliefs, perspectives, desires and knowledge (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1999; Astington & Baird, 2005; de Villiers, 2007; Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; Zhang & Wu, 2010; San Juan & Astington, 2012). Previous research has suggested that children’s development of Theory of Mind may be associated with various aspects of their linguistic development, including their acquisition of complement structures (de Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Schick, de Villiers, de Villiers & Hoffmeister, 2007; Low, 2010; Rakhlin, Kornilov, Reich, Babyonyshev, Koposov & Grigorenko, 2011), belief/epistemic verbs such as think, know, and believe (e.g., Moore, Pure & Furrow, 1990; Papafragou, Cassidy & Gleitman, 2007; Lewis, Hacquard & Lidz, 2017), discourse connections (Zufferey, 2010), and definite articles (e.g., De Cat, 2013; Modyanova & Wexler, 2013). Children’s comprehension of demonstratives, particularly when demonstratives are uttered based on a perspective different from children’s own, may be another domain in which their development of Theory of Mind plays an important role. Because the comprehension of demonstratives requires proper understanding of the speaker’s perspective, from which the proximal-distal contrast of speakerreferent distance is designated, successful comprehension of demonstratives uttered by speakers 12

with different perspectives from the hearer may rely on sufficiently developed Theory of Mind. Therefore, we hypothesize that the properly functioning Theory of Mind may serve as the prerequisite for children to correctly comprehend demonstratives uttered by a speaker whose perspective is not the same as their own. We thus hypothesize that children with more developed Theory of Mind are less likely to exhibit egocentric demonstrative comprehension. In particular, we focus on the role of a cognitive component of Theory of Mind called knowledge access (Wellman & Liu, 2004). Knowledge access is the ability to infer what another individual believes to be true (referred to as ‘true belief’, Wellman & Liu, 2004; cf. Schick et al., 2007). An individual’s true belief is taken to reflect how that individual sees and interprets the world, and thus in turn is taken to constitute the foundation of the orientation point/perspective of the individual. The hearer of an utterance containing a demonstrative would be required to understand what the speaker’s orientation point/perspective is, in order to correctly comprehend the demonstrative uttered by this speaker. Based on this reasoning, we hypothesize that knowledge access is part of the prerequisites for a child to correctly establish an orientation point based on the perspective of a speaker of utterances with demonstratives. Building upon this hypothesis, we will further hypothesize that children’s Executive Function may also be another source of their egocentric demonstrative comprehension. Executive Function is a constellation of cognitive abilities that are argued to control a variety of cognitive activities, including attentional control, inhibition, mental flexibility, and reasoning (e.g., Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki & Howerter, 2000). Recent research has begun to reveal a number of domains in which children’s Executive Function is argued to be related to the development of Theory of Mind (e.g., Devine & Hughes, 2014). In addition, Executive Function has also been reported to relate to children’s development of language in a variety of specific linguistic domains, 13

such as ambiguity resolution (e.g., Choi & Trueswell, 2009; Woodard, Pozan & Trueswell, 2016) and quantification (e.g., Minai, Jincho, Yamane & Mazuka, 2012; see, e.g., Mazuka, Jinho & Oishi, 2009, for review). Crucially, Executive Function development has also been argued to be linked to children’s pragmatic ability (e.g., Nilsen & Graham 2009) and perspective-taking (Samson & Apperly, 2010). We hypothesize that Executive Function may also impact demonstrative comprehension; the extent to which a child’s Executive Function ability is developed may affect the extent to which they are able to inhibit their own perspective and flexibly switch to the speaker’s perspective, as is necessary when a speaker utters a demonstrative in a context in which the speaker and child do not share the same perspective. We particularly focus on the role of inhibition as part of the Executive Function that may be crucially relevant. Given the findings that revealed children’s egocentric demonstrative comprehension, we assume that children’s ‘default’ setting of perspective is on their own 3. In order for a hearer to correctly incorporate someone else’s perspective different from their own, they need to first disengage themselves from their own perspective, for which successful inhibition is required. Thus, we hypothesize that successful inhibitory control may also be a prerequisite for successful comprehension of demonstratives uttered based on the speaker’s perspective when different from children’s own, for which they are required to inhibit their own perspective to disengage themselves from it. Children with still-developing inhibition may be challenged by this demand. Let us be more specific about how development of these cognitive abilities works in a hearer’s mind when comprehending demonstratives. We hypothesize that knowledge access and inhibition work in the following way. On the assumption that it is ‘default’ for a hearer to set her perspective as her own, demonstratives could be properly comprehended when uttered based on 14

the speaker’s perspective if it is the same as the hearer’s own. However, when the speaker’s perspective is not the same as the hearer’s own, knowledge access is required for the hearer to properly understand the speaker’s perspective, which is established based on her true belief. The hearer then needs to disengage herself from her own ‘default’ perspective, for which inhibition is required. Hence, the current study examines the relationships among demonstrative comprehension and both Theory of Mind and Executive Function, testing groups of English-speaking children and Chinese-speaking children. Before moving ahead, it may be worthwhile to consider the development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function from a cross-linguistic perspective. Some studies suggest that the development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function exhibit a similar trajectory regardless of a child’s language background. It has been suggested that children generally pass basic Theory of Mind tests around age 4 (e.g., Wellman, Cross & Watson, 2001), and there is some evidence that children acquiring different languages show a similar path of Theory of Mind development. Regarding the languages of our current interest, i.e., English and Mandarin Chinese, Liu, Wellman, Tardif, and Sabbagh (2008) reported that English-speaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking children passed the same Theory of Mind tests around the same age, suggesting that their developmental path may be similar. Similarly, Lee, Olson, and Torrance (1999) claim that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children develop Theory of Mind at a similar rate as English-speaking children. On the other hand, some studies have also suggested that, across language communities, children in some language groups may show facilitated Theory of Mind development compared to others. Tsou (2005), for example, claims that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children’s development of Theory of Mind may be slower than children acquiring Western languages, including English. Furthermore, the discussion becomes 15

even more complex if we consider how Theory of Mind development may interact with Executive Function development across language groups. On the one hand, some scholars argue for a universal in cognitive development, claiming that Theory of Mind and Executive Function may co-develop and this may be uniform regardless of age or language of children (e.g., Devine & Hughes, 2014). On the other hand, there is also evidence that runs counter to this claim. For example, Sabbagh, Xu, Carlson, Moses and Lee (2006) revealed that Mandarin Chinesespeaking children outperformed English-speaking children in tasks measuring Executive Function, whereas there was no significant difference between child groups in their performance on Theory of Mind tasks. Differences in children’s cognitive development reported in crosslinguistic studies are also interpreted in association with cultural factors (e.g., Avis & Harris, 1991; Callaghan, Rochat, Lillard, Claux, Odden, Itakura, Tapanya & Singh, 2005; Lee, Olson & Torrance, 1999; Liu, Wellman, Tardif, & Sabbagh, 2008; Oberle, 2009; Oh & Lewis, 2008). For example, a recent study examined children speaking different dialects of Chinese, one spoken in an area where exposure to Western culture is great and another spoken in an area where such exposure is limited. These researchers suggested a possible difference in cognitive development between dialect groups, as well as a cultural difference, associated with the diversity difference among communities (Duh, Paik, Miller, Gluck, Lee & Himelfarb, 2016). As such, there has been an ongoing debate regarding how children’s cognitive development may interact with their language background or with cultural factors, and it is essential to better understand how the language/cultural background of children may interact with their cognitive development. Although it is beyond our current scope to directly speak to this debate, in our current study, we focus on whether children’s cognitive development may impact their language development with respect to a single linguistic expression, i.e., 16

demonstratives. The current study will inform our understanding of to what extent demonstrative comprehension is modulated by an individual’s cognitive resources; crucially, cross-linguistic differences could in principle emerge if it is the case that demonstrative comprehension is impacted by cognitive development and it is the case that those children with more advanced development tend to come from one language group vs. another.

4.2. Design of the study In order to directly test whether Theory of Mind and Executive Function may be associated with children’s demonstrative comprehension, we designed a multi-task experimental study, utilizing both linguistic comprehension tasks to measure children’s demonstrative comprehension and cognitive tasks to examine their development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function. In order to also directly compare English-speaking children with Mandarin Chinese-speaking children, we prepared the same set of tasks in both languages so that each of these language groups was tested with the identical set of tasks. To measure children’s linguistic comprehension of demonstratives, we adopted two linguistic comprehension tasks, an Act-out Task and a Judgment Task. The Act-out Task measures children’s comprehension of demonstratives when uttered by a speaker that shares the same perspective as the child’s. This task was included to examine whether children can comprehend the proximal demonstrative and distal demonstrative correctly based on their own perspective. The results for this task are taken to indicate whether the child possesses an adultlike understanding of the basic meaning of demonstratives, with respect to the fundamental proximal vs. distal speaker-referent distance contrast established based on their own perspective. In order to assess whether children can comprehend demonstratives uttered based on a speaker’s 17

perspective which is different from their own, we designed the Judgment Task, a novel comprehension task in which the speaker of the utterance containing a demonstrative is a character in a story which is presented visually to the child. The proximal-distal contrast is established based on the character’s orientation point, not the child’s own. The child’s performance on this task provides a measure of whether their comprehension of demonstratives is adult-like, successfully incorporating the character’s orientation point into their computation of the meaning of the demonstrative. Crucially, we investigated children’s demonstrative comprehension in relation to their performance on two cognitive tasks, measuring their Theory of Mind and Executive Function. Recall that we hypothesize that properly functioning knowledge access and inhibition are subcomponents of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, respectively, which may serve as prerequisites for children’s successful demonstrative comprehension. To measure their Theory of Mind, particularly with respect to knowledge access, we utilized a Hiding Game task (de Villiers & Pyers, 2001; Gale, de Villiers, de Villiers, & Pyers, 1996; Schick et al., 2007). The Hiding Game is a modified version of the ‘Sticker Hiding Game’ (Schick et al., 2007), which is argued to particularly assesses knowledge access. As for our measurement of Executive Function, we selected the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task, which is argued to assess one’s inhibition ability (e.g., Frye, Zelazo & Palfai, 1995; Zelazo, 2006).

4.3. Predictions By means of this multi-task design, the current study primarily aims to test the following predictions. First, if Theory of Mind, particularly knowledge access, plays a crucial role in successful comprehension of demonstratives uttered based on a perspective different from 18

children’s own, as suggested by de Villiers (2007) and Diessel (2012), then a relationship is predicted between success in the Judgment Task and the Hiding Game, but not between children’s performance in the Act-out Task and the Hiding Game. Second, although it has not yet been proposed in the literature that Executive Function may be especially critical in demonstrative comprehension, if Executive Function, particularly inhibition, indeed plays a critical role in demonstrative comprehension, performance in the Judgment Task may also be associated with performance on the DCCS, while such an association should not be observed between children’s performance on the Act-out Task and their performance on the DCCS.

5. Method 5.1. Participants 5.1.1. English Group. Fifty-two English-acquiring children between the ages of 3 and 6 years old (3;0-6;2; mean=4;4; 26 males and 26 females) participated in the study, including 16 three-year-olds (3;0-3;10; mean=3;6), 23 four-year-olds (4;0-4;11; mean=4;5), 10 five-year-olds (5;0-5;7; mean=5;2), and 3 six-year-olds (6;1-6;2; mean=6;1). An additional eight children participated but their data were excluded from analysis: six were excluded because they did not complete all of the tasks; one was excluded because of a failure to learn the rules of the tasks; one was excluded due to coding errors. Each child was recruited at her preschool and tested individually in a quiet room. In addition, a control group of 20 adult native English speakers (19;3-23;2 years old; mean=20;3 years old) participated in the Judgment Task. Child participants were recruited from local preschools and nursery schools in Kansas, USA; the adult control group was recruited at the University of Kansas.

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5.1.2. Mandarin Chinese Group. We examined 60 Mandarin Chinese-acquiring children (4;4-6;3, mean=5;2; 34 males and 26 females) with 25 four-year-olds (4;4-4;11, mean=4;7), 26 five-year-olds (5;0-5;11, mean=5;5), and 9 six-year-olds (6;0-6;3, mean=6;1). Two additional children also took part in our study, but their data were excluded from the analysis because one did not complete all the tasks and the other could not learn the rules of the tasks. A control group of 16 adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (19;9-38;11, mean=33;8) also participated in the Judgment Task. The child participants were recruited from two preschools in Taiwan. The adult participants were recruited in Taiwan. It should be noted that we could not match the mean age between the two language groups due to practical difficulties in recruiting two languages groups in the two countries. The two language groups were recruited and tested by the same experimenter at different times, first in the USA and then in Taiwan, making it difficult to find 3-year-old children in Taiwan because of the lower sample availability for younger age groups at the recruitment sites. Considering the mean age difference between the two language groups, we analyzed our data including Age as a factor in our statistical tests; see below.

5.2. Tasks and Procedures We prepared the four experimental tasks, the Act-out Task, the Judgment Task, the Hiding Game, and the DCCS, both in English and Mandarin Chinese; all the linguistic materials used in the English version were translated into Mandarin Chinese. In the section below we discuss each task, providing sample linguistic stimuli only in English for the sake of brevity (a full list of the English and Chinese stimuli for the Act-out Task and the Judgment Task is provided in the Appendix). Child participants completed all four tasks in a single session in the 20

following order: (1) the Act-out Task; (2) the Judgment Task; (3) the Hiding Game; (4) the DCCS. The session for each child participant lasted approximately 30 minutes. The majority of the child participants completed the study at preschools/nursery schools that they were enrolled in; a few children in the English Group were tested in the second author’s research lab. Adult controls only completed the Judgment Task. The session for each adult participant lasted approximately 15 minutes. The protocol of the current study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Kansas.

5.2.1. Act-out Task. In order to measure children’s comprehension of demonstratives when sharing the same perspective as the speaker, we utilized the Act-out task. The results of this task provided a way to assess whether each child is able to interpret this as the proximal demonstrative and that as the distal demonstrative based on their own perspective. In the experimental workspace, the experimenter, who served as the speaker of the sentences containing demonstratives, sat right next to the child, on one side of a table. Thus, the child had the same perspective as the speaker, on the basis of which the speaker-object distance contrast was created. There was a long cloth (approximately 55 centimeters) on the table; two identical boxes were placed on the cloth, one at each end. One of the boxes was right in front of the child and the experimenter (i.e., the box to be referred to as ‘this box’ by the speaker), and the other was away from them (i.e., the box to be referred to as ‘that box’ by the speaker). The child was told to put a toy figurine (such as Winnie the Pooh) in one of the two boxes. In half of the trials, the experimenter uttered an instruction containing this (e.g., Put Winnie the Pooh in this box.): the child’s response was coded as correct if she put the toy figurine in the box right in front of her and the experimenter; the child’s response was incorrect if she put the toy figurine in the box 21

apart from her and the experimenter. In the other half of the trials, the experimenter uttered an instruction with that (e.g., Put Piglet in that box.): the child’s response was coded as correct if she put the toy figurine in the box on the other side of the table; the child’s response was coded as incorrect if she put the toy figurine in the box in front of her and the experimenter. There were six trials in total, three trials with this (this-items) and three trials with that (that-items). While speaking to the child, the experimenter did not provide any pointing gesture, or look at either of the boxes; she looked at the child’s eyes when uttering the instructions, in order not to confound linguistic and eye-gaze cues.

5.2.2. Judgment Task. The Judgment Task was conducted in order to examine whether children can correctly comprehend demonstratives uttered by a speaker who does not share the same perspective as them. We designed a set of picture stories with two main characters, the King and the Servant. The stories were presented via a series of pictures, using Microsoft PowerPoint. All of the linguistic stimuli were pre-recorded sound files that were presented as utterances spoken by the two main characters in the story. The stories about the King and the Servant were comprised of a series of episodes in which the Servant took a ‘good employee’ test, in which the Servant was tested on whether he was able to listen carefully to a demand made by the King and fulfill the King’s demand satisfactorily. In the visual scene, there were two identical objects, such as plates, one of which was placed right by the King and the other of which was placed apart from the King (see Figure 1a). The crucial linguistic stimuli containing the demonstratives were provided as the King’s demands for the Servant to paint one of the objects in the scene blue (e.g., Paint this/that plate blue.). When uttering the demand containing a demonstrative, the King did not point to or look at the object that he was telling the Servant to 22

paint. The Servant, in response to the King’s demand, painted one of the plates: in half of the trials, the Servant painted the plate whose position matched the location that the King’s selection of demonstrative designated; in the other half of the trials, the Servant painted the plate whose position did not match the location that the King’s selection of demonstrative designated. For example, when the King uttered the demand Paint this plate blue (i.e., this-items), the Servant painted either (i) the plate located right next to the King (see Figure 1b), or (ii) the plate located away from the King (see Figure 1c); when the King uttered the demand Paint that plate blue (i.e., that-items), the Servant painted either (i) the plate located apart from the King (see Figure 1c), or (ii) the plate located right by the King (see Figure 1b). After each painting event was completed, the Servant asked the child whether or not he painted the object that the King asked him to paint 4. The child’s judgment of each painting event was recorded: for trials showing a ‘correct’ painting event, i.e., this-items in which the Servant painted the object near the King, and that-items in which the Servant painted the object that was far from the King, the child’s acceptance was recorded as an adult-like response, while their rejection was coded as a nonadult-like response. For trials showing an ‘incorrect’ painting event, i.e., this-items in which the Servant painted the object that was far from the King, and that-items in which the Servant painted the object near the King, the child’s rejection was recorded as an adult-like response, while their acceptance was coded as a non-adult-like response. There were eight trials in total: four this-items and four that-items. Half of the trials of each type depicted a ‘correct’ painting event, while the other half depicted an ‘incorrect’ painting event.

[Figure 1 about here]

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Recall that, in Mandarin Chinese, demonstratives co-occur with a classifier which specifies the semantic category of the denotation of the noun it is associated with. Classifiers are known to play a role in anticipatory sentence processing because of their semantics which specifically cues what semantic category the upcoming noun should denote (Hsu, Tsai, Yang, & Chen, 2014; Wu, Kaiser, & Anderson, 2009; Wu, Luo, & Zhou, 2014). In order to minimize such a semantic cue that the classifier may potentially provide, for all the linguistic stimuli in Mandarin Chinese, we used a classifier –ge, which is one of the most general classifiers semantically selecting a wide variety of small objects in the denotation of associated nouns, such as plates, clocks, cups, and pillows (see Appendix for the full list of linguistic stimuli).

5.2.3. Hiding Game. The Hiding Game, our Theory of Mind measure, was administered as a story featuring three characters: Baby Chick, Brown Bear, and White Bear. Baby Chick served as the “Hider”, and the two bears became either the “Knower” or the “Guesser” in each of the trials, taking turns. The Hiding Game stories were presented using Microsoft PowerPoint. In the beginning of each story, Baby Chick, the Hider, showed a donut and three boxes to the child (see Figure 2a), and told the child that she is going to hide the donut in one of the three boxes. Then, the Hider told one of the bears to watch her hide the donut; this bear became the Knower, who would know in which box the Hider hid the donut. The other bear was blindfolded before the hiding event started; this bear became the Guesser, who could not witness the hiding event, and thus did not know where the donut was hidden (see Figure 2b). While the hiding event happened, a curtain blocked the scene so the child did not witness the hiding event (see Figure 2c); therefore, the child would not know which box contained the donut in the end. When the hiding event was completed, the curtain was removed and the Hider removed the Guesser’s 24

blindfold. The child was then asked to guess which box had the hidden donut, but before the child’s response was elicited, the Knower and the Guesser were asked to help the child by pointing to the box that they each thought had the donut (see Figure 2d). The measurement was which of the boxes the child selected. If the child selected the box that the Knower pointed to, it was interpreted as an adult-like response, in which the child inferred the knowledge state of the Knower and the Guesser, and correctly reasoned that it was the Knower’s knowledge state, not the Guesser’s, that indicated the correct box. Following Schick et al. (2007), we explicitly told the child before the presentation of each hiding event that the Knower will see how the hiding event goes and the Guesser will not. The Guesser left the blindfold on his forehead after it was removed from his eyes, so the child did not need to rely on his/her memory to know which character played which role. There were five hiding events/trials presented in total.

[Figure 2 about here]

5.2.4. DCCS. We administered the standard version of the DCCS, following Zelazo (2006), to assess children’s Executive Function. DCCS was administered on a computer screen, using the stimulus presentation software Paradigm (Perception Research Systems, Inc.; Tagliaferri, 2005). All the materials (testing cards and sorting boxes) were electronically presented as picture files. We prepared two sets of card sorting materials. The first set featured a bear and a car; each testing card depicted either a yellow bear or a blue car. Among the two sorting boxes, into which the testing cards were to be placed, one had a picture of a blue bear, and the other box had a picture of a yellow car. The other set of materials featured a tree and a house; each testing card depicted either a red tree or a green house. One of the sorting boxes 25

depicted a green tree, while the other depicted a red house. In this task, the child was first presented with the two sorting boxes, and the experimenter explained what each box depicted. In the beginning, the child was explicitly told what the sorting dimension was (e.g., This is a color game.). The experimenter provided a brief practice session, in which she presented the first two sorting cards and guided children to sort them into the right boxes based on the sorting dimension (for example, a testing card depicting a yellow bear would be placed in the box depicting the yellow car). After the practice session, the Pre-switch Phase started, in which children sorted six sorting cards one by one based on the sorting dimension. After the six cards were sorted, the experimenter told the child that they would be starting a new game, with a new sorting dimension (e.g., We are not playing the color game anymore. We are now going to play a shape game.); this is the beginning of the Post-switch Phase. There was no practice session provided before the Post-switch Phase; the child began sorting cards based on the second dimension immediately after the experimenter announced the switch of the sorting rule (for example, they should now place a car depicting a yellow bear into the box depicting the blue bear). The two sets of materials were used to counterbalance the order of the sorting dimensions across children. One set of the materials was used to present the two sorting dimensions in one order (e.g., color-based sorting during the Pre-switch Phase and then shape-based sorting during the Post-switch Phase), and the other set of the materials was used to present the two sorting dimensions in the reverse order.

6. Results 6.1. Descriptive summary of performance in each task To obtain a descriptive summary, we calculated the mean percentages of correct 26

responses for each task. For the Act-out Task and the Judgment Task, we calculated these values separately for this-items and for that-items. For the Hiding Game, we calculated the percentages of correct responses, in which children pointed to the correct box that had the donut in it. For DCCS, we calculated the percentages of correct card sorting separately for the Pre-switch phase and the Post-switch phase, which revealed that all children consistently succeeded in card sorting during the Pre-switch Phase. Therefore, we only included in our analysis the mean percentages of correct card sorting for the Post-switch Phase as DCCS scores. Table 1 shows a descriptive summary of the children’s performance on these tasks.

[Table 1 about here]

Overall, Mandarin Chinese-speaking children performed better than English-speaking children on most of the tasks, which is likely due to the fact that the Mandarin Chinese-speaking children were older than the English-speaking children on average. In the Act-out Task, children in both language groups performed much better on this-items than that-items, which replicated previous findings reporting the same asymmetry (e.g., Webb & Abrahamson, 1976; Clark & Sengul, 1978). Performance on the Judgment Task was poorer than that in the Act-out Task for both groups, indicating that comprehending demonstratives based on others’ perspective when different from the child’s own perspective is indeed challenging for children as was pointed out in the earlier literature. Adult controls’ performance on the Judgment Task exhibited near ceiling accuracy for both language groups (English this: mean %=98.75, SD=5.59; English that: mean %=100, SD=0.00; Mandarin Chinese this: mean %=100, SD=0.00; Mandarin Chinese that:

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mean%=100, SD=0.00), confirming that the speaker-distance contrast created based on the King’s perspective was appropriately established in our experimental design. Recall that our dependent variable is children’s performance on the Judgment Task, in which children’s demonstrative comprehension was assessed through a series of picture stories after which the children had to judge whether the Servant painted the correct object based on the King’s demand. An examination of the individual children’s responses in this task revealed that nearly half of the children exhibited a ‘yes’-bias response pattern, consistently accepting the Servant’s painting events as correct for all the trials (Total: N=54, mean age=4;8; Englishspeakers: N=25, mean age=4;4; Mandarin Chinese-speakers: N=29, mean age=5;0), yielding a 50% mean accuracy score (with 100% accuracy for items depicting a correct painting event and 0% accuracy for items depicting an incorrect painting event). Children’s ‘yes’-bias responses potentially carry a risk for yielding Type-I errors, in which children might return ‘yes’ responses for the wrong reasons (Crain & Thornton, 1998). While children were asked to justify why they rejected painting events when they returned ‘no’ responses, we did not provide follow-up questions to children regarding why they accepted painting events when they returned a ‘yes’ response, as we deemed it a challenging task for the child to have to explain the reasoning for acceptance they used. Therefore, it is not possible to infer whether their acceptance of correct painting items was indeed due to an adult-like interpretation of the target utterance containing the demonstrative. Since the inclusion of responses by those ‘yes’-biased children may yield Type-I errors and potentially complicate the interpretation of the results, we excluded the results from those 54 ‘yes’-biased children. The analyses that follow are based on the responses of the remaining 58 children that did not exhibit a ‘yes’-bias response pattern (English-speakers: N=27,

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mean age=4;5; Mandarin Chinese-speakers: N=31, mean age=5;5) 5. Table 2 below summarizes the mean percentages correct and standard deviation for each task.


Before moving ahead for the data analysis section, it should be noted here that by examining children’s demonstrative comprehension, we place a primary focus on their comprehension of the proximal demonstrative this/zhe. Lyons (1975) claimed that the appropriate use of the distal demonstrative (that/na) is either (i) as a neutral term to serve as an indexical without specifically pointing out the distance relative to the speaker, or (ii) as a distal term that is used to specify an object that is distant from the speaker (i.e. it creates a contrast with its proximal counterpart which specifies an object near the speaker). The fact that the distal demonstrative can be used as a distance-neutral indexical term may create vagueness in its distance designation. In addition, the range of speaker-referent distances viewed as ‘distal’ for the appropriate use of the distal demonstrative is much less restricted than the range viewed as ‘proximal’ for the appropriate use of the proximal demonstrative (e.g., Levinson, 2004; Diessel, 2012). That is, the proximal demonstrative only picks out entities that are in an unambiguously close domain or in the proximate domain, whereas the distal demonstrative can pick out entities that fall into either proximate or distant domains. Given that the proximal demonstrative and the distal demonstrative have different levels of restriction in the speaker-referent distance domain, Levinson (2004) suggested that the interpretation of the distal demonstrative may be less straightforward than the interpretation of the proximal demonstrative; the domains in which the distal demonstrative can be used may overlap with the domain that is appropriate for the 29

proximal demonstrative. Implicit domain restriction has been argued to constitute a challenge for young children in a number of other contexts as well, such as in the comprehension of quantifiers and the definite article (e.g., Krämer, 2004; Miller & Schmitt 2004; Rhaklin, 2007). Thus, the vagueness in interpretation of the distal demonstrative and the conceptual asymmetry regarding the interpretation of the proximal demonstrative and the distal demonstrative may help account for why children’s performance on the distal demonstrative was found to be poorer than that on the proximal demonstrative in the early literature on children’s demonstrative processing (e.g., Webb & Abrahamson, 1976; Clark & Sengul, 1978), as well as in the current study. In addition, an anonymous reviewer pointed out that the that-items presented in the Judgment Task (e.g., King’s utterance of “Paint that plate blue” in the given context as in Figure 1) may indeed be ambiguous in terms of which of the two plates were mentioned. Considering the vagueness in interpreting the distal demonstrative and the ambiguity of that-items in our experimental setting, in what follows, the results of the current study will be analyzed and discussed primarily in terms of children’s comprehension of this/zhe in the Act-out Task and the Judgment Task in the current paper.

6.2. Data analyses We first examined the relation among children’s demonstrative comprehension for the Judgment Task and their performances on the two cognitive tasks, the Hiding Game and the DCCS. Children’s data for the Judgment Task, measured as binary accurate/inaccurate responses, were analyzed by fitting a generalized linear mixed-effects model (glmer) with a binomial (logit) link function in R using the lme4 package (Bates et al. 2015). P-values were calculated using the lmerTest package in R (Kuznetzova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2016). 30

Model fitting started with the following fixed variables: Language (English vs. Chinese); Age in month; Count of correct responses in the Hiding Game (0-5); Count of correct responses in the DCCS (0-6; correct sorting only for the Post-switch Phase). Subject was included as a random effect. Model selection was carried out using likelihood ratio tests to compare simpler models to more complex models. For the final model, Age was excluded as it was a non-significant predictor factor and did not improve the model. The model with best fit is summarized in Table 3 below.


The results revealed that children’s performance on Hiding Game and the DCCS were both significant predictors for their performance on this-items in the Judgment Task (Hiding Game: z (229) = 2.20, p = .03; DCCS: z (229) = 2.33, p = .02). Language was not a significant predictor (z (229) = -1.13, p = .26). The results further revealed that the Hiding Game responses and DCCS responses were significantly correlated (rs = .30, p = .02), which motivated us to further examine these tasks in two separate models. The first model contained Language and Count of correct responses for the Hiding Game as fixed variables and revealed that response for Hiding Game was a significant predictor (z(229) = 2.46, p = .01), but Language was not (z(229) = -1.10, p = .27). The second model contained Language and Count of correct responses for DCCS as fixed variables and revealed that responses for DCCS was a significant predictor (z(229) = 2.58, p < .01), but Language was not (z(229) = -1.62, p = .10). These results suggest that children’s rates of accurate responses for the Judgment Task increased as their accurate responses for Hiding Game and DCCS increased, regardless of their language. 31

We also examined the relation among children’s demonstrative comprehension for the Actout Task and their performances on the cognitive tasks. Children’s data in the Act-out Task, measured as binary accurate/inaccurate responses, were analyzed by fitting the same generalized linear mixed-effects model, starting with the same set of fixed variables: Language (English vs. Mandarin Chinese); Age; Count of correct responses in the Hiding Game; Count of correct responses in the DCCS (correct sorting only for the Post-switch phase). Subject was included as a random effect. Again, Age was excluded as it was a non-significant predictor factor and did not improve the model, as measured by a likelihood ratio test comparing models. The results revealed that none of the predictors were significant (p = 1.00 for all the fixed variables), suggesting that children’s performance for the Hiding Game and DCCS, as well as their language, played no role on their performance for the Act-out Task. In sum, our predictions were borne out. The results suggest that children’s correct comprehension of the demonstrative this/zhe, when uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children’s own, is associated with (i) their performance for the Hiding Game measuring their Theory of Mind, particularly knowledge access, and (ii) their performance for the DCCS measuring their Executive Function, particularly inhibition. However, no such association was revealed among children’s comprehension of the demonstrative this/zhe based on their own perspective and their performances for the Hiding Game and DCCS. Taken together, the results are in line with the hypotheses that Theory of Mind and Executive Function may influence children’s successful comprehension of demonstratives uttered based on a perspective different from their own.

7. Discussion 32

In the current study, we administered a set of tasks investigating whether children’s comprehension of demonstratives, primarily the proximal demonstrative this/zhe, is related to their still-developing cognitive abilities, particularly in the domains of Theory of Mind and Executive Function. As discussed, the ‘yes’-bias children’s responses were excluded because including ‘yes’-bias responses may invite Type-I errors in interpreting the results (Crain & Thornton, 1998). Therefore, we will focus on the findings from the subset of non-‘yes’-bias children (N=58) in discussing the relations among children’s proximal demonstrative comprehension and their cognitive development, as well as the roles of the children’s age and language. Additionally, we will further discuss the methodological considerations that motivated us to exclude ‘yes’-bias children and suggest avenues for further research.

7.1. What is required for successful comprehension of demonstratives uttered by speakers with a different perspective from one’s own The present study revealed that children’s comprehension of the proximal demonstrative as measured in the Judgment Task was related to their performance on the Theory of Mind measure. Our Theory of Mind measure was a version of the Hiding Game (Schick et al., 2007), which was designed to assess an aspect of children’s Theory of Mind called knowledge access, the ability to understand others’ true beliefs. On the assumption that one’s perspective is established based on her true belief, we hypothesized that children’s knowledge access serves as a prerequisite for their proper comprehension of demonstratives uttered by the speaker whose perspective is different from the hearer’s own. Hiding Game performance, measuring children’s knowledge access, was reported to be a significant predictor for Judgment Task performance, measuring children’s demonstrative comprehension uttered by the speaker with a perspective 33

different from their own. However, Hiding Game performance was not a significant predictor for Act-out Task performance, measuring children’s comprehension of demonstratives uttered based on their own perspective. These findings are in line with our hypothesis that knowledge access is a prerequisite for a child to be able to successfully comprehend a demonstrative uttered based on a perspective different from her own. The relation between children’s comprehension of the proximal demonstrative and Executive Function, in particular its inhibition component, is also taken to support our hypothesis that inhibition is required for successful demonstrative comprehension. Sufficient inhibition ability may be especially critical when comprehending the proximal demonstrative when it is uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from the child’s own. Children’s default perspective setting is thought to be their own (egocentric). When the proximal demonstrative is uttered by a speaker with a perspective different from the children’s own, children first need to disengage themselves from their own perspective; if a child possesses greater inhibitory control resources, she may be more likely to be able to inhibit her own perspective and thus better able to take the speaker’s perspective into account. This prediction was borne out, whereby DCCS performance, measuring inhibition, was a significant predictor of children’s demonstrative comprehension measured in the Judgment Task. Taken together, our findings suggest that both Theory of Mind, specifically knowledge access, and Executive Function, specifically inhibition, are required for comprehending demonstratives uttered based on a perspective different from one’s own. Children, who are still developing these two cognitive abilities, are less successful in properly settling on the speaker’s perspective, through (i) correct understanding that the speaker’s perspective is different from their own and (ii) successful disengagement from their own ‘default’ perspective, resulting in exhibiting egocentric errors. 34

Our statistical results also revealed a significant correlation between Hiding Game performance and DCCS performance. This finding is in line with previous studies, suggesting that Theory of Mind and Executive Function co-develop and are mutually dependent (e.g., Hughes, 1998; Palmer & Lang, 1999; Devine & Hughes, 2004; cf. Carlson & Moses, 2007). Our findings suggest that development of demonstrative comprehension may be another domain where development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function play an important role, both independently and in correlation.

7.2. Demonstrative comprehension development from a cross-linguistic perspective To the best of our knowledge, the current study serves as the first to examine children’s demonstrative comprehension comparably across different languages with demonstratives encoding a two-way proximal vs. distal contrast in speaker-referent distance. Children’s language did not serve as a significant predictor of their success in comprehension of demonstratives in the Judgment Task. This finding suggests that the development of demonstrative comprehension proceeds similarly regardless of the language children are acquiring. Although the English-speaking children were about one year younger than the Mandarin Chinese-speaking children on average, neither age nor language were robust predictors of demonstrative comprehension success (age was only found to be a significant predictor of children’s demonstrative comprehension when we included ‘yes’-bias children’s responses in the analysis). These findings suggest that demonstrative comprehension may develop along a similar trajectory across languages like English and Mandarin Chinese. Although English and Mandarin Chinese do show some differences with regard to the morphological representation of demonstratives, they are largely similar with regard to encoding a two-way proximal/distal 35

contrast, and it would thus be interesting in future research to compare language pairings which may have more dissimilar demonstrative inventories to further examine the role of crosslinguistic differences in the development of demonstrative comprehension. However, the contrast between English and Mandarin Chinese in demonstrative development is also relevant to a debate regarding whether children acquiring these languages may develop differently with regard to non-linguistic cognitive abilities, which could in turn have yielded differences between English and Mandarin Chinese acquiring children’s ability to comprehend demonstratives. While some studies have suggested similar developmental trajectories across English- and Mandarin Chinese-acquiring children as regards Theory of Mind (Lee et al., 1999; Sabbagh et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2008) and Executive Function (Devine & Hughes, 2014), others have argued that children acquiring English and those acquiring Mandarin Chinese demonstrate different patterns in the development of Theory of Mind (Tsou, 2005) and Executive Function (Sabbagh et al., 2006). The current study is not designed to test the hypothesis that these non-linguistic abilities may develop differently in these two populations. However, our findings do suggest that these cognitive abilities impact the development of demonstrative comprehension similarly across English- and Mandarin Chinese-learning children, and none of our findings suggest that either of these language groups were at a delay overall compared to the other. In this sense, our results are consistent with a view in which Theory of Mind and Executive Function exert their influence similarly during development in both Englishand Mandarin Chinese-learning child populations.

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8. Conclusion We investigated children’s comprehension of demonstratives, an aspect of language in which children are known to face difficulties, particularly in contexts in which they need to incorporate a speaker’s perspective which is different from their own to arrive at an adult-like interpretation. We assessed this issue cross-linguistically, testing children learning languages (English, Mandarin Chinese) in which demonstratives encode a two-way speaker-entity distance (proximal vs. distal). Children were administered multiple tasks, measuring the comprehension of demonstratives uttered both based on the same perspective as their own and based on a different perspective from their own, as well as their development of Theory of Mind and their development of Executive Function. The findings suggest that children’s comprehension of demonstratives is related to performance on tasks assessing both Theory of Mind and Executive Function; the findings do not suggest that demonstrative comprehension was impacted by what language they were learning. Based on these findings, we suggest that children’s comprehension of demonstratives is related to their non-linguistic cognitive development in the domains of Theory of Mind and Executive Function. The current findings provide new evidence suggesting that children’s development of language comprehension is related to their development in nonlinguistic cognitive domains.

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Appendix I.

Linguistic stimuli used in the Act-out Task: Experimenter’s act-out instruction

English 1. Put Pooh in this box. 2. Put Rabbit in that box. 3. Put Piglet in this box. 4. Put Owl in that box. 5. Put Kangaroo in that box. 6. Put Eeyore in this box.

Mandarin Chinese (Notes on gloss: BA= the morpheme required for a demanding sentence; CL= a classifier) 1. Ba weinixiong fun zai zhe-ge hezi li BA Pooh put in this-CL box inside ‘Put Pooh in this box.’ 2. Ba tuzi fun zai na-ge hezi li BA Rabbit put in that-CL box inside ‘Put Rabbit in that box.’ 3. Ba xiaozhu fun zai zhe-ge hezi li BA Piglet put in this-CL box inside ‘Put Piglet in this box.’ 4. Ba maotouying fun zai na-ge hezi li BA Owl put in that-CL box inside ‘Put Owl in that box.’ 5. Ba daishu fun zai na-ge hezi li BA Kangaroo put in that-CL box inside ‘Put Kangaroo in that box.’ 6. Ba luzi fun zai zhe-ge hezi li BA Eeyore put in this-CL box inside ‘Put Eeyore in this box.’ 48

II.

Linguistic stimuli used in the Judgement Task: the King’s painting demands

English 1. Paint this plate blue. 2. Paint this bowl blue. 3. Paint this pot blue. 4. Paint this clock blue. 5. Paint that pillow blue. 6. Paint that cup blue. 7. Paint that bag blue. 8. Paint that box blue.

Mandarin Chinese (Notes on gloss: BA= the morpheme required for a demanding sentence; CL= a classifier) 1. Ba zhe-ge panzi tu cheng lanse BA this-CL plate paint as blue ‘Paint this plate blue.’ 2. Ba zhe-ge wan tu cheng lanse BA this-CL bowl paint as blue ‘Paint this bowl blue.’ 3. Ba zhe-ge guozi tu cheng lanse BA this-CL pot paint as blue ‘Paint this pot blue.’ 4. Ba zhe-ge shizhong tu cheng lanse BA this-CL clock paint as blue ‘Paint this clock blue.’ 5. Ba na-ge zhentou tu cheng lanse BA that-CL pillow paint as blue ‘Paint that pillow blue.’ 49

6. Ba na-ge beizi tu cheng lanse BA that-CL cup paint as blue ‘Paint that cup blue.’ 7. Ba na-ge daizi tu cheng lanse BA that-CL bag paint as blue ‘Paint that bag blue.’ 8. Ba na-ge xiangzi tu cheng lanse BA that-CL box paint as blue ‘Paint that box blue.’

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Footnotes 1

An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the distal demonstrative may not indeed be

‘distal’. Indeed, some scholars categorize the two-way coding of the speaker-referent distinction as ‘proximal’ vs. ‘non-proximal’ (e.g., Ghomeshi, Paul & Wiltschko, 2004). Our focus in the current study is on the parallel in demonstratives in English and Chinese which encode a twoway contrast in speaker-referent distance, and will just refer to the types of demonstratives as ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’. 2

Zhao (2007) recruited children aged from three to six, but each age group only involved

two children. In addition, she did not include in the analysis the data from one of the two children for one age group because the two items located in the workspace, a cookie and a piece of candy, invited preference-based selection from this child. 3

Recent studies on adults’ demonstrative comprehension also suggest their tendency to be

egocentric for comprehending demonstratives (Stevens & Zhang, 2013; 2014), and we could also assume that adults’ default setting of perspective is also on their own. 4

In the Judgment Task, while making efforts to control the discourse so that the use of a

demonstrative would be as felicitous as possible without having the speaker’s eye gaze placed on the object being referred to. In the stories used in the Judgment Task, we selected the King and the Servant as two interlocutors, with King serving as the demander/uttering demands with demonstratives, and the Servant serving as the fulfiller/hearing demonstratives uttered by King and responding to his demands with demonstratives. At the beginning of the task, the storyline was presented as a situation where the Servant would be ‘tested’ in terms of how good a servant he is; if he is a good servant, he should be able to figure out which of the objects in the space King wants him to paint, even if the King was not looking at the object when he uttered a 51

demand with a demonstrative (= a test item, e.g., “Paint that cup blue”). This specific story setting was used to control the felicity of the discourse in which demonstratives were uttered without the speaker’s eye gaze cue. 5

In the current study, children were characterized as yes-biased if they responded “yes” to 4

out of 4 target trials. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, this criterion relies on a relatively small number of trials. While the number of target trials in the current study was limited in order to minimize the length of the experiment, future research including a larger number of trials would allow for a more precise characterization of yes-bias among the child participants.

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Figure Captions

Figure 1: Sample visual materials for the Judgment Task for the test sentence Paint this plate blue; a – the initial setting, in which the King and the Servant appear; b – an outcome in which the Servant painted the object right next to the King, which elicits a ‘yes/correct’ response for this items and a ‘no/incorrect’ response for that items; c – an outcome in which the Servant painted the object away from the King, which elicited a ‘no/incorrect’ response for this item and a ‘yes/correct’ response for that items.

Figure 2: Sample visual materials for the Hiding Game; a – the initial setting, in which all the characters were introduced; b – before the hiding took place, one of the bears (e.g., brown bear) was blindfolded, while the other bear (e.g., white bear) was told to see the hiding; c – a curtain blocked the scene during the hiding was in progress, which masked the hiding even from the child’s view; d – each bear points to the box he thinks contains the hidden donut, in which the Knower was indicated by the eye mask still placed on his forehead.

Table 1: Mean percentages and standard deviations of the correct responses in each task (all children included, N=112) English (N=52; mean age=4;5)

Chinese (N=60; mean age=5;3)

Mean %

SD

Mean %

SD

Act-out this

86.54

16.52

88.89

15.85

Act-out that

58.98

35.92

70.00

32.30

Judgment this

58.17

21.42

63.75

21.80

Judgment that

55.29

23.40

62.08

26.64

Hiding Game

62.69

30.69

78.33

26.11

DCCS Post-switch

67.31

46.20

65.56

46.83

Note: For DCCS, all the children were consistently correct for the Pre-switch card sorting, so DCCS score is reported as the mean percentage of correct card sorting for the Post-switch Phase.

Table 2: Mean percentages and standard deviation of correct responses (‘yes’-bias children excluded, N=58) English (N=27; mean age=4;5)

Chinese (N=31; mean age=5;5)

Mean %

SD

Mean %

SD

Act-out this

87.65

16.40

88.17

16.21

Act-out that

56.79

37.91

76.34

28.79

Judgment this

65.74

27.86

76.61

24.10

Judgment that

60.19

31.97

73.39

33.50

Hiding Game

67.41

24.90

80.00

26.83

DCCS Post-switch

66.67

46.91

69.35

45.97

Table 3: Estimates of fixed effects, this items in Judgment Task Estimate

SE

z

p

(Intercept)

-0.392

0.558

-0.703

0.482

Language

-0.381

0.33598

-1.134

0.257

Hiding Game: correct count

0.282

0.128

2.201

0.028*

DCCS: Post-switch correct count

0.137

0.059

2.330

0.020*

Dependent variable: Judgment Task this items, accuracy Notes: Age was excluded from the model with best fit as it was not significant and it correlated with Hiding Game: Correct Count and DCCS: Post-switch Correct Count.