Thought and language: Effects of group-mindedness on young children's interpretation of exclusive we.

The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a speaker puppet responded, "We did!" In one condition, the speaker was near one and distant from another puppet, implying a dyadic interpretation of we. In another condition, the speaker was distant from both, thus pulling for a group interpretation. In the former condition, 2- and 4-year-olds favored the dyadic interpretation. In the latter condition, only 4-year-olds favored the group interpretation. Age-related conceptual development "expands" the set of conceivable plural person referents.

A New Look at Young Children's Referential Informativeness.

In this article, I review experimental evidence for the dependence of 2- to 5-year-olds' linguistic referential informativeness on cues to common ground (CG) and propose a process model. Cues to CG provide evidence for CG, that is, for the shared knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes of interlocutors. The presence of cues to CG (e.g., unimpeded listener line of regard or prior mention) is shown to be associated with less informative reference (e.g., pronouns). In contrast, the absence of cues to CG (e.g., impeded listener line of regard or new mention) is shown to be associated with more informative reference (e.g., nouns). Informativeness is sensitive to linguistic before nonlinguistic cues to CG (i.e., 2.0 vs. 2.5 years old, respectively). Reference is cast as a process of active inference, a formulation of Bayesian belief-guided control in biological systems. Child speakers are hierarchical generative models that, characteristically, expect sensory evidence for the evolved, prior Bayesian belief that interlocutor mental states are aligned (i.e., that CG exists). Referential control emerges as an embodied tool to gather evidence for this prior belief. Bottom-up cues to CG elicited by action drive updates to beliefs about CG. In turn, beliefs about CG guide efficient referential control.

The study of rational framing effects needs developmental psychology.

Experimental research is reviewed which suggests that rational framing effects influence young children's social activities according to a logic of interdependence. However, young children are unlikely to possess some of the elaborate cognitive skills argued in the Target Article to be prerequisite for rational framing effects. Understanding rational framing effects requires understanding their ontogenetic origins.

Effects of "we"-framing on young children's commitment, sharing, and helping.

By around 3 years of age, collaboration induces in young children a normative sense of "we" that creates a sense of obligation (e.g., commitment, fairness) toward their collaborative partner. The current study investigated whether this normative sense of we could be induced purely verbally in 3- and 4-year-old children. Children joined a puppet at a table to draw. In one condition the puppet repeatedly framed things as "we" are going to sit at the table, "we" are going to draw, and so forth, whereas in the other condition the pronoun used was always "you." Dependent measures gauged children's commitment, resource distribution, and helping behavior toward their partner. Results showed that both 3- and 4-year-olds felt a greater sense of commitment to their partner after "we"-framing than after "you"-framing. The 4-year-olds evidenced this commitment by showing a greater reluctance to abandon their partner for a more fun game compared with the 3-year-olds. The 3-year-olds did not share this reluctance, but when they did abandon their partner they more often took leave following we-framing by "announcing" their leaving. There were no effects of we-framing on children's sharing with their partner or helping behavior. These results suggest that verbal we-framing, as compared with you-framing, is an effective means of inducing in children a sense of shared agency and commitment with a partner.

A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference.

Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals' mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics of cooperative communication. Our formulation is based on active inference. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual's internal model of the world. We propose that humans are characterized by an evolved adaptive prior belief that their mental states are aligned with, or similar to, those of conspecifics (i.e., that 'we are the same sort of creature, inhabiting the same sort of niche'). The use of cooperative communication emerges as the principal means to gather evidence for this belief, allowing for the development of a shared narrative that is used to disambiguate interactants' (hidden and inferred) mental states. Thus, by using cooperative communication, individuals effectively attune to a hermeneutic niche composed, in part, of others' mental states; and, reciprocally, attune the niche to their own ends via epistemic niche construction. This means that niche construction enables features of the niche to encode precise, reliable cues about the deontic or shared value of certain action policies (e.g., the utility of using communicative constructions to disambiguate mental states, given expectations about shared prior beliefs). In turn, the alignment of mental states (prior beliefs) enables the emergence of a novel, contextualizing scale of cultural dynamics that encompasses the actions and mental states of the ensemble of interactants and their shared environment. The dynamics of this contextualizing layer of cultural organization feedback, across scales, to constrain the variability of the prior expectations of the individuals who constitute it. Our theory additionally builds upon the active inference literature by introducing a new set of neurobiologically plausible computational hypotheses for cooperative communication. We conclude with directions for future research.