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., ) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.

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 and suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life.

Narrative production in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Similarities and differences.

The present study focuses on the similarities and differences in language production between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we investigated whether Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory, and response inhibition are associated with language production. Narratives, produced by 106 Dutch-speaking children (36 with ASD, 34 with ADHD, and 36 typically developing) aged 6 to 12 during ADOS assessment, were examined on several linguistic measures: verbal productivity, speech fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical semantics, and discourse pragmatics.

Who Is He? Children with ASD and ADHD Take the Listener into Account in Their Production of Ambiguous Pronouns.

During conversation, speakers constantly make choices about how specific they wish to be in their use of referring expressions. In the present study we investigate whether speakers take the listener into account or whether they base their referential choices solely on their own representation of the discourse. We do this by examining the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the choice of referring expression at different discourse moments.