The Role of Executive Functions and Emotion Knowledge in Children’s Communication Repair

Young children often provide insufficient information when speaking with others, making the ability to identify miscommunications and repair inadequate messages essential skills within their set of communicative abilities. Previous work has investigated children’s ability to detect and repair miscommunications in response to verbal cues from their listeners, but no work has explored their ability to do so in response to nonverbal cues from a listener. Study 1 assessed children’s ability to detect and repair miscommunications in response to nonverbal cues provided by a listener. Children (ages 4 to 6) provided a virtual child listener with instructions on how to find a prize. If the child provided a uniquely identifying message, the listener looked happy after presumably finding the prize. If the child provided an ambiguous message, the listener appeared sad after presumably failing to find the prize. Children demonstrated awareness, through ratings, as to whether or not the listener found the prize on each trial, based solely on her facial expression. Children were also more likely to attempt to repair their messages on trials where the listener appeared sad. With respect to individual differences, children with stronger executive functioning (as indexed by a latent variable) and emotion knowledge were more accurate in their ratings of communicative success. Children with stronger emotion knowledge were also more likely to attempt to repair their messages when the listener appeared sad. Overall, findings from Study 1 suggest that children are able to make use of nonverbal cues from a listener to detect and repair miscommunications. Findings also suggest that executive functioning and emotion knowledge support children’s ability to detect and repair miscommunications. Study 2 compared children’s ability to detect miscommunications and immediately repair their messages in response to different types of listener feedback. That is, children were provided with an opportunity to respond directly following the listener’s affective response (rather than after questions) and prior to the listener’s selection of prize location. After providing an ambiguous message, children (ages 4 to 6) were provided with feedback indicating the listener was confused. Children were more likely to attempt to repair their messages following verbal cues from the listener compared to a baseline condition (i.e., a listener pause). Notably, nonverbal feedback (i.e., a confused facial expression) was no better than the baseline condition at eliciting communication repair. The combination of verbal and nonverbal cues was also no more effective at eliciting communication repair than verbal cues alone. Interestingly, children frequently attempted to repair their messages in the baseline condition, which consisted only of a listener pause. When executive functioning components were examined individually, working memory was found to be associated with children’s likelihood of attempting to repair their messages, and with the quality of children’s repairs. Emotion knowledge was found to be associated with the quality of children’s repairs. The findings of Study 2 suggest that children are able to repair their messages in response to nonverbal feedback (given that they attempted to repair even in the baseline condition), but that they are more likely to repair their messages in response to verbal feedback. Findings also highlight the important role of executive functioning and emotion knowledge in children’s communication. Results from these two studies have theoretical implications for children’s communicative development, as well as implications for research methodology, the measurement of executive functioning, and interventions targeted to improve children’s communication skills

The Role of Executive Functions in Children’s Communication Repair

Young children often provide ambiguous referential statements for their listeners. Thus, the ability to identify when miscommunication has occurred and subsequently repair messages is an essential component of communicative development. The present study examined the impact of listener feedback and children’s executive functioning in influencing children’s ability to repair their messages. Further, this work explored whether the cognitive demands of repair differed depending on the type of feedback provided by the listener. Children (ages 4 to 6) completed a referential communication task, in which they described target pictures amongst an array of similar distractors for a confederate. Stimuli were designed such that children would often provide initially ambiguous referential statements. Subsequently they were provided with feedback from the confederate indicating they had been misunderstood. Feedback was either detailed and specified the nature of the miscommunication, or was vague and did not. Children also completed executive functioning tasks assessing their working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Children with larger working memory capacities and better cognitive flexibility were found to provide more effective initial descriptions of the target pictures. Children with better cognitive flexibility were also more effective at repairing their statements in response to feedback indicating they had been misunderstood. While children provided more effective repairs following detailed feedback than vague feedback, this effect did not interact with the cognitive skills of the children. The practical implications of the results are discussed

Cognitive and behavioural predictors of adolescents' communicative perspective-taking and social relationships

The final publication is available at Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2017.01.004. © 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Given the pivotal role that social interactions play for adolescents' well-being, understanding the factors that influence communication is key. The present study examined relations between adolescents' communicative perspective-taking, executive function skills, and ADHD traits and explored the role communicative perspective-taking plays in peer relations. Data was collected from a community sample of 15 to 19-years-olds (N = 46) in Waterloo, Canada. Two communicative perspective-taking tasks required participants to infer speakers' communicative intentions. A battery of tasks assessed adolescents' working memory and inhibitory control. Elevated ADHD traits were associated with weaker working memory, inhibitory control, and communicative perspective-taking. Working memory was the strongest predictor of communicative perspective-taking. Highlighting the importance of communicative perspective-taking for social interactions, adolescents with weaker skills in this area reported worse peer relations. Findings underscore the importance of communicative perspective-taking for adolescents' social relations and have relevance for understanding the social difficulties faced by adolescents with elevated ADHD traits

The relationship between children's executive functioning, theory of mind, and verbal skills with their own and others' behaviour in a cooperative context: Changes in relations from early to middle school-age

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Huyder, V., Nilsen, E., & Bacso, S. (2017). The relationship between children’s executive functioning, theory of mind, and verbal skills with their own and others’ behaviour in a cooperative context: Changes in relations from early to middle school-age. Infant and Child Development, 26(6), e2027. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2027, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2027. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.Learning to behave in socially competent ways is an essential component of children's development. This study examined the relations between children's social, communicative, and cognitive skills and their behaviours during a cooperative task, as well as how these relationships change at different ages. Early school-age (5–8 years old) and middle school-age (9–12 years old) children completed tasks to assess their executive functioning (i.e., inhibitory control, working memory, and planning), theory of mind, and verbal skills and participated in an interactive cooperative task. Because children participated in pairs, dyadic data analysis was used to examine the effect of individual characteristics on children's own and their partners' social behaviour. Results indicated that better theory of mind was related to lower levels of the competitive behaviours demonstrated by younger children, as well as by partners. In contrast, for older children, planning and verbal skills related to lower levels of competitive behaviour. The associations of theory of mind and planning skills with behaviour were significantly different between the early and middle school-age groups. Findings suggest that children may utilize different skills at various developmental stages to guide their social behaviours. Findings have implications for theories of children's social development, as well as for interventions aimed at enhancing social skills

How to turn that frown upside down: Children make use of a listener’s facial cues to detect and (attempt to) repair miscommunication

The final publication is available at Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105097. © 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Communication involves the integration of verbal and nonverbal cues. This study assessed preschool-age children’s ability to use their conversational partner’s facial expression to determine whether the partner required additional information or not. Children (aged 4;0–5;11 [years;months]; N = 101) played a game with a virtual child partner where they attempted to tell the virtual child in which box a prize was hidden. Children needed to provide several features of pictures on each box to uniquely identify the correct box. After providing their instructions, children viewed a video of the virtual child’s emotional reaction (prize found = happy, not found = sad). We assessed children’s recognition that miscommunication had occurred, their decision of whether or not to repair their message, and the content of their repairs. We found that children were able to determine whether or not the listener found the prize, and gauge their own skill at providing instructions, based on the listener’s facial expression. Furthermore, children were more likely to attempt to repair messages when the listener appeared to be sad, although their actual success in repairing the message was minimal. With respect to individual differences, children with higher executive functioning and higher emotion knowledge skills were more accurate in their perceptions of communicative success. Children with higher emotion knowledge skills were more likely to attempt to repair their messages when the listener appeared to be sad. Overall, this study demonstrates that children are able to make inferences about communication using a listener’s facial expression and that emotion recognition and executive functioning support this ability