Tell Me a Story! Children’s Capacity for Topic Shift

Young children often give the impression that they speak or listen from their own perspective, with little or no recognition of the linguistic information that a discourse partner might be using. In relation to discourse reference, children often demonstrate insensitivity to rules that determine the use of discourse pronouns (Karmiloff-Smith 1981). Frequently, discourse development has been explained by such cognitive notions as egocentricity. However, recent eye-tracking studies have shown that very young children are not exclusively egocentrically oriented (Nadig & Sedivy 2002) and that even adults sometimes begin with an egocentric perspective and only later switch to their partner’s perspective (Keysar, Barr, Balin & Paek 1998). The question in the present study is: if children and adults are capable of cognitively taking either perspective, do both children and adults linguistically take into account their partner’s perspective in discourse? To explore this question, children and adults participated in a production experiment and a comprehension experiment aimed at investigating their sensitivity to discourse topic and topic shift. In Section 1, we discuss the theoretical framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory, which is shown to make linguistic predictions as to expected differences between adults and children when they deal with topic shift during discourse. Adult speakers and hearers are predicted to optimize bidirectionally and, therefore, to use specific referring expressions to maintain or shift topics during discourse. If children optimize unidirectionally, they will demonstrate a different use or interpretation of referring expressions. Section 2 introduces a production experiment and a comprehension experiment, designed to test for possible discourse topic differences between adults and children. For production, the participants are asked to describe six-page picture books and for comprehension they listen to structured stories about which a question must be answered. The results of these two experiments are presented in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the differences between adults’ and children’s use and interpretation of pronouns and noun phrases as signaling topic and topic shift in ongoing discourse. Conclusions are summarized in Section 5.