The roles of feedback and working memory in children’s reference production

Abstract Children’s communicative perspective-taking ability was investigated in a sample of 62 5- and 6-year-olds using a spoken production referential communication task in which speakers identify target objects for listeners. We assessed whether children would make use of non-verbal negative feedback to improve their future production of referring expressions, which involve words or phrases that function in discourse to identify individual objects. We also examined whether the use of such feedback is related to cognitive resources. Results indicated that children who were given feedback from addressees produced more informative referring expressions than those who received no feedback. Furthermore, this tendency to effectively make use of feedback was greatest among children with higher working memory. These findings demonstrate that feedback can facilitate learning about referential communication and suggest that one limitation in using such feedback is the ability to hold it in mind so that it can be used to guide the production of referring expressions.