The social-cognitive basis of infants’ reference to absent entities
Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that infants as young as 12 month of age use pointing to communicate about absent entities. The tacit assumption underlying these studies is that infants do so based on tracking what their interlocutor experienced in a previous shared interaction. The present study addresses this assumption empirically. In three experiments, 12-month-old infants could request additional desired objects by pointing to the location in which these objects were previously located. We systematically varied whether the adult from whom infants were requesting had previously experienced the former content of the location with the infant. Infants systematically adjusted their pointing to the now empty location to what they experienced with the adult previously. These results suggest that infants’ ability to communicate about absent referents is based on an incipient form of common ground.
Citation
Bohn , M , Zimmermann , L , Call , J & Tomasello , M 2018 , ' The social-cognitive basis of infants’ reference to absent entities ' , Cognition , vol. 177 , pp. 41-48 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.024
Publication
Cognition
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0010-0277Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.024
Description
Manuel Bohn was supported by a scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation and Josep Call was supported by the “SOMICS” ERC-Synergy grant (nr. 609819).Collections
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