Five-year-olds' sensitivity to knowledge discrepancies about object identity during online language comprehension.

In everyday communication, children experience situations where their knowledge or perspectives differ from those of their communicative partner. The current study examined this issue in the context of real-time language comprehension, focusing on 5-year-old children's ability to manage knowledge discrepancies about the identity of mutually visible objects. In Experiment 1, we examined 5-year-olds' ability to manage privileged knowledge about an object's identity. Using a referential communication task, we tested children (N = 60) in either a shared knowledge condition, where both the child and the speaker knew the identity of a visually misleading object (e.g., a candle that looks like an apple), or a privileged knowledge condition, where only the child knew the identity of the visually misleading object. Of interest was whether children could suppress private knowledge while processing a phonologically related word (e.g., "Look at the candy"). Results showed that children did not inhibit this knowledge during the early moments of referential interpretation. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), we contrasted the privileged knowledge condition in Experiment 1 with the more traditional scenario used to test common ground use, where the child knows the speaker cannot see certain display objects. Results confirmed a stronger ability to manage discrepancies in the latter case. Together, the findings demonstrate differences in children's ability to manage distinct types of knowledge discrepancies during real-time language comprehension.

Preschoolers modulate contrastive inferences during online language comprehension.

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N = 120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a correspondingly typical or atypical way. Critical utterances contained size adjectives (e.g., "Look at the big duck"). With conventional speakers, gaze measures indicated that children rapidly used the adjective to differentiate members of a contrasting pair, indicating that even 4-year-olds derive contrastive inferences. With unconventional speakers, contrastive inferences were delayed in processing. The findings demonstrate that preschoolers adjust their use of pragmatic cues when presented with evidence disconfirming their default assumptions about a speaker.

Theory of Mind after Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Scoping Review.

This scoping review aims to synthesize existing literature regarding theory of mind (ToM) outcomes, the neuropathology associated with ToM outcomes, and the relationship between ToM outcomes and social functioning in children and adolescents with traumatic brain injury (TBI). We searched MEDLINE® and PsycINFO databases to identify all literature that examined ToM following pediatric TBI until July 2019. A total of 29 articles met inclusion and exclusion criteria and were included in the results. These articles examined a variety of aspects of ToM, which could be broadly grouped into those focused on cognitive, cognitive-affective, and pragmatic factors. The existing literature suggests that children and adolescents with TBI, compared with their typically developing peers and peers with orthopedic injuries, are more likely to have deficits in ToM. The evidence further shows that the age at which brain injury occurs contributes to ToM disruption. Neuroimaging techniques have offered crucial insights into how TBI may impact ToM performance in children and adolescents. Finally, this review provides evidence that disruption in ToM plays a role in the difficulties in social functioning demonstrated by children and adolescents with TBI. Limitations and gaps in the existing literature warrant future research in this field.

Pragmatic Language Comprehension After Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Scoping Review.

OBJECTIVE: This scoping review aims to examine the literature pertaining to pragmatic language comprehension in pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI), in order to summarize the current evidence and to identify areas for further research. METHODS: We searched MEDLINE Ovid and PsycINFO Ovid using search terms to identify all articles that examined pragmatic language comprehension in children and adolescents with TBI published until November 2017. RESULTS: A total of 13 articles met our inclusion criteria. The studies included examined a number of pragmatic domains including knowledge-based and pragmatic inferences, detection and judgment of ambiguous sentences, comprehension of humor, understanding of figurative language (eg, metaphors and idioms), and comprehension of irony and deceptive praise. CONCLUSION: The research suggests that children and adolescents with TBI, as compared with healthy or orthopedically injured controls, display deficits in comprehension of pragmatic language. Children with severe TBI demonstrate more widespread deficits in pragmatic comprehension abilities, whereas children with mild TBI show relatively intact pragmatic comprehension. Limitations and gaps identified in the literature warrant further research in this area.