An eye-tracking study of selective trust development in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

The purpose of this study was to explore whether children with autism display selectivity in social learning. We investigated the processing of word mappings provided by speakers who differed on previously demonstrated accuracy and on potential degree of reliability in three groups of children (children with autism spectrum disorder, children with developmental language disorder, and typically developing children) aged 4-9 years. In Task 1, one speaker consistently misnamed familiar objects and the second speaker consistently gave correct names. In Task 2, both speakers provided correct information but differed on how they could achieve this accuracy. We analyzed how the speakers' profiles influenced children's decisions to rely on them in order to learn novel words. We also examined how children attended to the speakers' testimony by tracking their eye movements and comparing children' gaze distribution across speakers' faces and objects of their choice. Results show that children rely on associative trait attribution heuristics to selectively learn from accurate speakers. In Task 1, children in all groups preferred the novel object selected by accurate speakers and directly avoided information provided by previously inaccurate speakers, as revealed by the eye-tracking data. In Task 2, where more sophisticated reasoning about speakers' reliability was required, only children in the typically developing group performed above chance. Nonverbal intelligence score emerged as a predictor of children's preference for more reliable informational sources. In addition, children with autism exhibited reduced attention to speakers' faces compared with children in the comparison groups.

Perspective-taking in deriving implicatures: The listener's perspective is important too.

Theories of meaning propose that listeners understand a speaker's implicit meaning thanks to mutually assumed norms of conversation that take into account what the speaker has said, as well as contextual factors, including what the speaker knows. Emerging psycholinguistic research shows that listeners derive a particular kind of implicit meaning, quantity implicatures, when their speaker is knowledgeable about the situation but tend to not derive it otherwise. In this article we focus on if and how listeners use the knowledge that is available only to themselves, i.e., the listener's perspective, while deriving implicatures. To do so, we explore the derivation of ad hoc quantity implicature in situations where the speaker does or does not have full knowledge, while, in the latter case, the listener has two types of privileged knowledge. Two versions of a study with neurotypical English-speaking adults show that listeners are influenced by their own perspective while deriving implicatures, depending on the type of knowledge available to them. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of pragmatic interpretative strategies.

Referential processing in 3- and 5-year-old children is egocentrically anchored.

An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner's perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal instructions. Contrary to the predictions of the partner-specific view, entrained referential precedents give rise to faster processing for 3- and 5-year-old children, independently of whether the conversational partner is the same as in the lexical entrainment phase or not. Additionally, both age groups display a processing preference for the interaction with the same partner, be it for new or previously used referential descriptions. These results suggest that preschool children may adapt to their conversational partner; however, partner-specificity is encoded as low-level auditory-phonological priming rather than through inferences about a partner's perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).