Prelingually Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants Show Better Perception of Voice Cues and Speech in Competing Speech Than Postlingually Deaf Adults With Cochlear Implants.

OBJECTIVES: Postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulties with perceiving differences in speakers' voice characteristics and benefit little from voice differences for the perception of speech in competing speech. However, not much is known yet about the perception and use of voice characteristics in prelingually deaf implanted children with CIs. Unlike CI adults, most CI children became deaf during the acquisition of language. Extensive neuroplastic changes during childhood could make CI children better at using the available acoustic cues than CI adults, or the lack of exposure to a normal acoustic speech signal could make it more difficult for them to learn which acoustic cues they should attend to. This study aimed to examine to what degree CI children can perceive voice cues and benefit from voice differences for perceiving speech in competing speech, comparing their abilities to those of normal-hearing (NH) children and CI adults. DESIGN: CI children's voice cue discrimination (experiment 1), voice gender categorization (experiment 2), and benefit from target-masker voice differences for perceiving speech in competing speech (experiment 3) were examined in three experiments. The main focus was on the perception of mean fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), the primary acoustic cues related to speakers' anatomy and perceived voice characteristics, such as voice gender. RESULTS: CI children's F0 and VTL discrimination thresholds indicated lower sensitivity to differences compared with their NH-age-equivalent peers, but their mean discrimination thresholds of 5.92 semitones (st) for F0 and 4.10 st for VTL indicated higher sensitivity than postlingually deaf CI adults with mean thresholds of 9.19 st for F0 and 7.19 st for VTL. Furthermore, CI children's perceptual weighting of F0 and VTL cues for voice gender categorization closely resembled that of their NH-age-equivalent peers, in contrast with CI adults. Finally, CI children had more difficulties in perceiving speech in competing speech than their NH-age-equivalent peers, but they performed better than CI adults. Unlike CI adults, CI children showed a benefit from target-masker voice differences in F0 and VTL, similar to NH children. CONCLUSION: Although CI children's F0 and VTL voice discrimination scores were overall lower than those of NH children, their weighting of F0 and VTL cues for voice gender categorization and their benefit from target-masker differences in F0 and VTL resembled that of NH children. Together, these results suggest that prelingually deaf implanted CI children can effectively utilize spectrotemporally degraded F0 and VTL cues for voice and speech perception, generally outperforming postlingually deaf CI adults in comparable tasks. These findings underscore the presence of F0 and VTL cues in the CI signal to a certain degree and suggest other factors contributing to the perception challenges faced by CI adults.

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

A cognitive modeling approach to learning and using reference biases in language.

During real-time language processing, people rely on linguistic and non-linguistic biases to anticipate upcoming linguistic input. One of these linguistic biases is known as the implicit causality bias, wherein language users anticipate that certain entities will be rementioned in the discourse based on the entity's particular role in an expressed causal event. For example, when language users encounter a sentence like "Elizabeth congratulated Tina…" during real-time language processing, they seemingly anticipate that the discourse will continue about Tina, the object referent, rather than Elizabeth, the subject referent. However, it is often unclear how these reference biases are acquired and how exactly they get used during real-time language processing. In order to investigate these questions, we developed a reference learning model within the PRIMs cognitive architecture that simulated the process of predicting upcoming discourse referents and their linguistic forms. Crucially, across the linguistic input the model was presented with, there were asymmetries with respect to how the discourse continued. By utilizing the learning mechanisms of the PRIMs architecture, the model was able to optimize its predictions, ultimately leading to biased model behavior. More specifically, following subject-biased implicit causality verbs the model was more likely to predict that the discourse would continue about the subject referent, whereas following object-biased implicit causality verbs the model was more likely to predict that the discourse would continue about the object referent. In a similar fashion, the model was more likely to predict that subject referent continuations would be in the form of a pronoun, whereas object referent continuations would be in the form of a proper name. These learned biases were also shown to generalize to novel contexts in which either the verb or the subject and object referents were new. The results of the present study demonstrate that seemingly complex linguistic behavior can be explained by cognitively plausible domain-general learning mechanisms. This study has implications for psycholinguistic accounts of predictive language processing and language learning, as well as for theories of implicit causality and reference processing.

An exploration of error-driven learning in simple two-layer networks from a discriminative learning perspective.

Error-driven learning algorithms, which iteratively adjust expectations based on prediction error, are the basis for a vast array of computational models in the brain and cognitive sciences that often differ widely in their precise form and application: they range from simple models in psychology and cybernetics to current complex deep learning models dominating discussions in machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, despite the ubiquity of this mechanism, detailed analyses of its basic workings uninfluenced by existing theories or specific research goals are rare in the literature. To address this, we present an exposition of error-driven learning - focusing on its simplest form for clarity - and relate this to the historical development of error-driven learning models in the cognitive sciences. Although historically error-driven models have been thought of as associative, such that learning is thought to combine preexisting elemental representations, our analysis will highlight the discriminative nature of learning in these models and the implications of this for the way how learning is conceptualized. We complement our theoretical introduction to error-driven learning with a practical guide to the application of simple error-driven learning models in which we discuss a number of example simulations, that are also presented in detail in an accompanying tutorial.

School-age children benefit from voice gender cue differences for the perception of speech in competing speech.

Differences in speakers' voice characteristics, such as mean fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), that primarily define speakers' so-called perceived voice gender facilitate the perception of speech in competing speech. Perceiving speech in competing speech is particularly challenging for children, which may relate to their lower sensitivity to differences in voice characteristics than adults. This study investigated the development of the benefit from F0 and VTL differences in school-age children (4-12 years) for separating two competing speakers while tasked with comprehending one of them and also the relationship between this benefit and their corresponding voice discrimination thresholds. Children benefited from differences in F0, VTL, or both cues at all ages tested. This benefit proportionally remained the same across age, although overall accuracy continued to differ from that of adults. Additionally, children's benefit from F0 and VTL differences and their overall accuracy were not related to their discrimination thresholds. Hence, although children's voice discrimination thresholds and speech in competing speech perception abilities develop throughout the school-age years, children already show a benefit from voice gender cue differences early on. Factors other than children's discrimination thresholds seem to relate more closely to their developing speech in competing speech perception abilities.

Children's Pronoun Interpretation Problems Are Related to Theory of Mind and Inhibition, But Not Working Memory.

In several languages, including English and Dutch, children's acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., him) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.g., himself). Various syntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this delay in children's acquisition of pronoun interpretation. This study aims to provide more insight into this delay by investigating potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this delay. Dutch-speaking children between 6 and 12 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 47), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 36) or typical development (TD; n = 38) were tested on their interpretation and production of object pronouns and reflexives and on theory of mind, working memory, and response inhibition. It was found that all three groups of children had difficulty with pronoun interpretation and that their performance on pronoun interpretation was associated with theory of mind and inhibition. These findings support an explanation of object pronoun interpretation in terms of perspective taking, according to which listeners need to consider the speaker's perspective in order to block coreference between the object pronoun and the subject of the same sentence. Unlike what is predicted by alternative theoretical accounts, performance on pronoun interpretation was not associated with working memory, and the children made virtually no errors in their production of object pronouns. As the difficulties with pronoun interpretation were similar for children with ASD, children with ADHD and typically developing children, this suggests that certain types of perspective taking are unaffected in children with ASD and ADHD.

Child-Like Adults: Dual-Task Effects on Collective vs. Distributive Sentence Interpretations.

In this work, we consider a recent proposal that claims that the preferred interpretation of sentences containing definite plural expressions, such as "The boys are building a snowman," is not determined by semantic composition but is pragmatically derived via an implicature. Plural expressions can express that each member of a group acts individually (distributive interpretation) or that the group acts together (collective interpretation). While adults prefer collective interpretations for sentences that are not explicitly marked for distributivity by the distributive marker each, children do not show this preference. One explanation is that the adult collective preference for definite plurals arises due to a conversational implicature. If implicature calculation requires memory resources, children may fail to calculate the implicature due to memory limitations. This study investigated whether loading Dutch-speaking adults' working memory, using a dual task, would elicit more child-like distributive interpretations, as would be predicted by the implicature account. We found that loading WM in adults did lead to response patterns more similar to children. We discuss whether our results offer a plausible explanation for children's development of an understanding of distributivity and how our results relate to recent debates on the role of cognitive resources in implicature calculation.

How Children Process Reduced Forms: A Computational Cognitive Modeling Approach to Pronoun Processing in Discourse.

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning "He/She/It runs") as referring to the most prominent referent in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, "He runs") as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian-speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded-rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research.

Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language.

Although 2-year-old English- or Dutch-speaking children tend to use correct subject-object word order in their own utterances, they appear to make a substantial number of word order errors in their comprehension of other people's utterances. This pattern of adult-like production but poor comprehension is challenging for linguistic theory. While most approaches to language acquisition explain this pattern from extra-linguistic factors such as task demands, the constraint-based approach Optimality Theory predicts this asymmetry between production and comprehension to arise as a result of the linguistic competition between constraints on word order and animacy. This study tests this prediction by investigating how children's comprehension and production of word order in transitive constructions develop, and to what degree their comprehension and production are influenced by animacy. Two- and three-year-old Dutch speaking children (n = 32) and adult controls (n = 41) were tested on their comprehension and production of simple transitive sentences, in which the animacy of the grammatical subject and object were manipulated. Comprehension was tested in a picture selection task and a preferential looking task, and production was tested in a parallel sentence elicitation task. Children's comprehension of transitive sentences in the picture selection task was found to be less accurate than their production of the same sentences in the sentence elicitation task. Their eye gaze in the minimally demanding preferential looking task did not reveal a more advanced understanding of these sentences. In comprehension, children's response accuracy, and to a lesser extent their eye gaze, was influenced by the animacy of subject and object, providing evidence that their poor comprehension is due to the competition between word order and animacy, as predicted by the constraint-based approach. In contrast, animacy may have a facilitating effect on children's production of transitive sentences. These findings suggest that the mature form and meaning of a transitive construction are not acquired together. Rather, the form-meaning pairings of transitive constructions seem to arise gradually as the by-product of acquiring the constraint ranking of the grammar. This leads to the gradual alignment of forms and meanings in child language and hence to the emergence of linguistic constructions.

Order Matters! Influences of Linear Order on Linguistic Category Learning.

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an artificial language learning experiment, we identify two factors that modulate linear order effects in linguistic category learning: category structure and the level of abstraction in a category hierarchy. Regarding category structure, we find that postmarking brings an advantage for learning category diagnostic stimulus dimensions, an effect not present when categories are non-confusable. Regarding levels of abstraction, we find that premarking of super-ordinate categories (e.g., noun class) facilitates learning of subordinate categories (e.g., nouns). We present detailed simulations using a plausible candidate mechanism for the observed effects, along with a comprehensive analysis of linear order effects within an expectation-based account of learning. Our findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre- and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system.

Development of vocal emotion recognition in school-age children: The EmoHI test for hearing-impaired populations.

Traditionally, emotion recognition research has primarily used pictures and videos, while audio test materials are not always readily available or are not of good quality, which may be particularly important for studies with hearing-impaired listeners. Here we present a vocal emotion recognition test with pseudospeech productions from multiple speakers expressing three core emotions (happy, angry, and sad): the EmoHI test. The high sound quality recordings make the test suitable for use with populations of children and adults with normal or impaired hearing. Here we present normative data for vocal emotion recognition development in normal-hearing (NH) school-age children using the EmoHI test. Furthermore, we investigated cross-language effects by testing NH Dutch and English children, and the suitability of the EmoHI test for hearing-impaired populations, specifically for prelingually deaf Dutch children with cochlear implants (CIs). Our results show that NH children's performance improved significantly with age from the youngest age group onwards (4-6 years: 48.9%, on average). However, NH children's performance did not reach adult-like values (adults: 94.1%) even for the oldest age group tested (10-12 years: 81.1%). Additionally, the effect of age on NH children's development did not differ across languages. All except one CI child performed at or above chance-level showing the suitability of the EmoHI test. In addition, seven out of 14 CI children performed within the NH age-appropriate range, and nine out of 14 CI children did so when performance was adjusted for hearing age, measured from their age at CI implantation. However, CI children showed great variability in their performance, ranging from ceiling (97.2%) to below chance-level performance (27.8%), which could not be explained by chronological age alone. The strong and consistent development in performance with age, the lack of significant differences across the tested languages for NH children, and the above-chance performance of most CI children affirm the usability and versatility of the EmoHI test.

Development of voice perception is dissociated across gender cues in school-age children.

Children's ability to distinguish speakers' voices continues to develop throughout childhood, yet it remains unclear how children's sensitivity to voice cues, such as differences in speakers' gender, develops over time. This so-called voice gender is primarily characterized by speakers' mean fundamental frequency (F0), related to glottal pulse rate, and vocal-tract length (VTL), related to speakers' size. Here we show that children's acquisition of adult-like performance for discrimination, a lower-order perceptual task, and categorization, a higher-order cognitive task, differs across voice gender cues. Children's discrimination was adult-like around the age of 8 for VTL but still differed from adults at the age of 12 for F0. Children's perceptual weight attributed to F0 for gender categorization was adult-like around the age of 6 but around the age of 10 for VTL. Children's discrimination and weighting of F0 and VTL were only correlated for 4- to 6-year-olds. Hence, children's development of discrimination and weighting of voice gender cues are dissociated, i.e., adult-like performance for F0 and VTL is acquired at different rates and does not seem to be closely related. The different developmental patterns for auditory discrimination and categorization highlight the complexity of the relationship between perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of voice perception.

Editors' Review and Introduction: Lying in Logic, Language, and Cognition.

We describe some recent trends in research on lying from a multidisciplinary perspective, including logic, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, we outline the seven contributions to this special issue of topiCS.

Complex Inferential Processes Are Needed for Implicature Comprehension, but Not for Implicature Production.

Upon hearing "Some of Michelangelo's sculptures are in Rome," adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to "Some but not all Michelangelo's sculptures are in Rome." Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children's production of scalar expressions like some and all suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. Thus, children's production of implicatures seems to develop at least 2 years before their comprehension of implicatures. In this paper, we present a novel account of scalar implicature generation in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: the Asymmetry Account. We show that the production-comprehension asymmetry is predicted to emerge because the comprehension of some requires the hearer to consider the speaker's perspective, but the production of some does not require the speaker to consider the hearer's perspective. Hence, children's comprehension of scalar expressions, but not their production of scalar expressions, is predicted to be related to their theory of mind development. Not possessing fully developed theory of mind abilities yet, children thus have difficulty in comprehending scalar expressions such as some in an adult-like way. Our account also explains why variable performance is found in experimental studies testing children's ability to generate scalar implicatures; moreover, it describes the differences between children's and adults' implicature generation in terms of their ability to recursively apply theory of mind; finally, it sheds new light on the question why the interpretation of numerals does not require implicature generation.

The acquisition of compositional meaning.

How do people create meaning from a string of sounds or pattern of dots? Insights into this process can be obtained from the way children acquire sentence meanings. According to the well-known principle of compositionality, the meaning of an expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and the way they are syntactically combined. However, children frequently seem to ignore syntactic structure in their sentence interpretations, suggesting that syntax is merely one of the sources of information constraining meaning and does not have a special status. A fundamental assumption in the argument in favour of compositionality is that speakers and listeners generally agree upon the meanings of sentences. Remarkably, however, children as listeners do not always understand what they are able to produce as speakers, and vice versa. For example, children's production of word order appears to develop ahead of their comprehension of word order in the acquisition of languages like English and Dutch. Such production-comprehension asymmetries are not uncommon in child language and motivate a view of compositionality as a principle pertaining to the result of perspective taking, and of meaning composition as a process of speaker-listener coordination. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.

Event-related potentials reveal increased dependency on linguistic context due to cognitive aging.

Whereas executive functions are known to be closely tied to successful language processing in children and younger adults, less is known about how age-related decline in these functions affects language processing in elderly adults. Because the abilities to use linguistic context and resolve potential ambiguities such as between an idiom's figurative and literal meaning depend on executive functions, we investigated this issue by examining elderly adults' processing of idioms in context. We recorded event-related potentials of 25 younger (age 18-28) and 25 elderly adults (age 61-74) while they read literal sentences and sentences containing an idiom (e.g., the Dutch idiom to walk against the lamp, meaning "to get caught"), each preceded by a neutral or predictive context sentence. Participants' use of context was hypothesized to relate to working memory capacity, while their ability to disambiguate idioms was hypothesized to depend on inhibition skills. Both groups showed facilitated processing for idioms compared with literal sentences and for sentences preceded by predictive compared with neutral contexts, indexed by a reduced N400. However, only elderly adults showed an increased P600 for literal but not idiomatic sentences preceded by a predictive context, suggesting that they rely on linguistic context when a sentence's meaning needs to be computed word by word, but not when a large part is retrieved from memory (as in idioms). Our findings suggest that in both younger and elderly adults processing literal sentences requires more cognitive effort than processing idiomatic sentences, and that cognitive aging affects language when processing is effortful. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Analyzing the Time Course of Pupillometric Data.

This article provides a tutorial for analyzing pupillometric data. Pupil dilation has become increasingly popular in psychological and psycholinguistic research as a measure to trace language processing. However, there is no general consensus about procedures to analyze the data, with most studies analyzing extracted features from the pupil dilation data instead of analyzing the pupil dilation trajectories directly. Recent studies have started to apply nonlinear regression and other methods to analyze the pupil dilation trajectories directly, utilizing all available information in the continuously measured signal. This article applies a nonlinear regression analysis, generalized additive mixed modeling, and illustrates how to analyze the full-time course of the pupil dilation signal. The regression analysis is particularly suited for analyzing pupil dilation in the fields of psychological and psycholinguistic research because generalized additive mixed models can include complex nonlinear interactions for investigating the effects of properties of stimuli (e.g., formant frequency) or participants (e.g., working memory score) on the pupil dilation signal. To account for the variation due to participants and items, nonlinear random effects can be included. However, one of the challenges for analyzing time series data is dealing with the autocorrelation in the residuals, which is rather extreme for the pupillary signal. On the basis of simulations, we explain potential causes of this extreme autocorrelation, and on the basis of the experimental data, we show how to reduce their adverse effects, allowing a much more coherent interpretation of pupillary data than possible with feature-based techniques.

Which Questions Do Children With Cochlear Implants Understand? An Eye-Tracking Study.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of morphosyntactic cues (case and verb agreement) by children with cochlear implants (CIs) in German which-questions, where interpretation depends on these morphosyntactic cues. The aim was to examine whether children with CIs who perceive the different cues also make use of them in speech comprehension and processing in the same way as children with normal hearing (NH). Method Thirty-three children with CIs (age 7;01-12;04 years;months, M = 9;07, bilaterally implanted before age 3;3) and 36 children with NH (age 7;05-10;09 years, M = 9;01) received a picture selection task with eye tracking to test their comprehension of subject, object, and passive which-questions. Two screening tasks tested their auditory discrimination of case morphology and their perception and comprehension of subject-verb agreement. Results Children with CIs who performed well on the screening tests still showed more difficulty on the comprehension of object questions than children with NH, whereas they comprehended subject questions and passive questions equally well as children with NH. There was large interindividual variability within the CI group. The gaze patterns of children with NH showed reanalysis effects for object questions disambiguated later in the sentence by verb agreement, but not for object questions disambiguated by case at the first noun phrase. The gaze patterns of children with CIs showed reanalysis effects even for object questions disambiguated at the first noun phrase. Conclusions Even when children with CIs perceive case and subject-verb agreement, their ability to use these cues for offline comprehension and online processing still lags behind normal development, which is reflected in lower performance rates and longer processing times. Individual variability within the CI group can partly be explained by working memory and hearing age. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7728731.

Temporarily Out of Order: Temporal Perspective Taking in Language in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Clinical reports suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle with time perception, but few studies have investigated this. This is the first study to examine these children's understanding of before and after. These temporal conjunctions have been argued to require additional cognitive effort when conjoining two events in a clause order that is incongruent with their order in time. Given the suggested time perception impairment and well-established cognitive deficits of children with ASD, we expected them to have difficulties interpreting temporal conjunctions, especially in an incongruent order. To investigate this, the interpretation of before and after in congruent and incongruent orders was examined in 48 children with ASD and 43 typically developing (TD) children (age 6-12). Additional tasks were administered to measure Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory (WM), cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, IQ, and verbal ability. We found that children with ASD were less accurate in their interpretation of temporal conjunctions than their TD peers. Contrary to our expectations, they did not have particular difficulties in an incongruent order. Furthermore, older children showed better overall performance than younger children. The difference between children with ASD and TD children was explained by WM, ToM, IQ, and verbal ability, but not by cognitive inhibition and flexibility. These cognitive functions are more likely to be impaired in children with ASD than in TD children, which could account for their poorer performance. Thus, the cognitive factors found to affect the interpretation of temporal language in children with ASD are likely to apply in typical development as well. Sufficient WM capacity and verbal ability may help children to process complex sentences conjoined by a temporal conjunction. Additionally, ToM understanding was found to be related to children's interpretation of temporal conjunctions in an incongruent order, indicating that perspective taking is required when events are presented out of order. We conclude from this that perspective-taking abilities are needed for the interpretation of temporal conjunctions, either to shift one's own perspective as a hearer to another point in time, or to shift to the perspective of the speaker to consider the speaker's linguistic choices.