| Institution: | 1. Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany;2. DeepMind, London, UK
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;3. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany;4. Brandenburg Medical School Theodor Fontane, Neuruppin, Germany;5. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA |
| Abstract: | Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three- to 5-year-old German-speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. Research Highlights - Individual differences in pragmatic abilities are important to understanding variation in language development.
- Research in this domain lacks a precise theoretical framework and psychometrically high-quality measures.
- We present six tasks capturing a wide range of pragmatic abilities with excellent re-test reliability.
- We use a computational cognitive model to provide a substantive theory of individual differences in pragmatic abilities.
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