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Davies Kreysa JCL 2018

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Journal of Child Language (2018), 1–28

doi:10.1017/S0305000918000120

ARTICLE

Look before you speak: children’s integration

of visual information into informative
referring expressions
Catherine DAVIES1* and Helene KREYSA2
1
University of Leeds, UK and 2Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany
*Corresponding author. School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT,
UK. E-mail: c.n.davies@leeds.ac.uk

(Received 3 August 2017; revised 8 December 2017; accepted 27 March 2018)

Abstract
Children’s ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a
production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast
objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual
scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that
although four-year-olds fixate contrast objects to a similar extent as seven-year-olds and
adults, this does not result in explicit referential informativeness. Instead, four-year-olds
frequently omit distinguishing information from their referring expressions regardless
of the comprehensiveness of their visual scan. In contrast, older children make greater
use of information gleaned from their visual inspections, like adults. Thus, we find a
barrier not to the INCIDENCE of contrast fixations by younger children, but to their USE
of them in referential informativeness. We recommend that follow-up work investigates
whether younger children’s immature executive skills prevent them from describing
referents in relation to contrast objects.

Keywords: referring expressions; language production; eye-tracking

Introduction
Of the wide range of pragmatic phenomena developing throughout childhood, the
ability to refer unambiguously is a communicative priority, yet the component and
integrative skills driving this are still unclear. The current study focuses on the
development of a foundational prerequisite for unambiguous reference: the ability to
visually scan a scene and then integrate distinguishing information into felicitous
referring expressions. To complement the large body of existing work investigating
the later stages of reference production (e.g., assessing accessibility; perspective-
taking: Allen, Hughes, & Skarabela, 2015: Nadig & Sedivy, 2002), here we focus on
the earlier stages, when speakers collect the information they need to eventually
produce fully informative referring expressions.
© Cambridge University Press 2018

In learning to communicate effectively, children must learn to refer to objects

unambiguously by using informative referring expressions (e.g., “the small apple” to
refer to the smaller member of a pair of apples) and to avoid producing
under-informative expressions (e.g., “the apple” in the same context). To achieve this,
they must consider the visual aspects of the referential context that the addressee is
likely to consider when identifying the intended referent. In particular, the speaker
must attend to the presence of any similar objects in the shared context that the
target referent must be distinguished from, and then integrate that information into
their chosen referring expression. They must also consider pragmatic aspects of the
exchange, such as the consequences of referring inadequately. These considerations
require the integration of various types of knowledge while speech is being planned,
and involve complex skills that may take several years to acquire. Our study focuses
on the relationship between children’s visual attention and their developing
informativeness. Specifically, we ask how children come to use visual information as
they mature towards a stage of being fully informative.
The ability to produce informative expressions develops throughout childhood.
Children initially pass through a phase of habitual under-informativeness before they
master the ability to reliably and spontaneously produce appropriately overt
expressions at around seven years of age, (although full informativeness has been
documented at younger ages depending on the task: Abbot-Smith, Nurmsoo, Croll,
Ferguson, & Forrester, 2016; Davies & Katsos, 2010; Matthews, Butcher, Lieven, &
Tomasello, 2012; Matthews, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2007; Whitehurst, 1976;
Whitehurst & Sonnenschein, 1981). The development of referential skills has been
investigated by a wide range of studies focusing on the use of articles, pronouns vs.
full nouns, and modified noun phrases (for reviews see Allen et al., 2015; De Cat,
2015; Dickson, 1982; Graf & Davies, 2014) using variants of the referential
communication task. These typically require the child to unambiguously identify a
target referent from arrays of similar objects for an addressee (Glucksberg, Krauss, &
Weisberg, 1966; Krauss & Glucksberg, 1969). Several explanations for children’s
persistent under-informativeness have been proposed, e.g., difficulties in
understanding that a referring expression must describe the differences between
target and distractor items (Whitehurst, 1976; Whitehurst & Sonnenschein, 1981);
lack of communicative breakdown, feedback, or modelling (Matthews et al., 2007);
egocentricity and lack of perspective-taking (Glucksberg et al., 1966; Nadig & Sedivy,
2002), and immature executive function skills (De Cat, 2015; Nilsen & Graham,
2009; Varghese & Nilsen, 2013). Together, these various accounts highlight the need
to examine the underlying cognitive prerequisites in order to explain young
children’s under-informativeness. To address this need, the current study measures
children’s visual search and linguistic skills, then examines the relationship between
these skills and their referential abilities. Knowledge of these foundational skills is
essential for understanding how children come to integrate them to become more
proficient users of referring expressions.
Although the field stands to gain much from examining the component skills for
referring, we must first ascertain how children COLLECT the data that they then go on
to manage using more sophisticated cognitive and executive skills. How does
children’s visual scanning behaviour influence the informativeness of their referring
expressions? When do they start to make meaningful comparisons between the
referent they want to talk about, and other comparable objects? How does the
complexity of the display affect their ability to produce informative referring
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Journal of Child Language 3

expressions? How much time is required to encode distinguishing features, and how
long in advance of articulation? What enables them to identify these distinctive
features and then encode them into their referential choices? To address these
questions, we investigate how the prerequisite of VISUAL SCANNING BEHAVIOUR affects
children’s referential informativeness.
Although few studies of children’s sentence production have used eye-movement
paradigms, existing research demonstrates the value of such methods in examining
links between children’s visual attention, speech planning, and referential production.
Bunger, Trueswell, and Papafragou (2012) recorded four-year-olds’ eye-movements as
they described motion events to ascertain whether children’s linguistic omissions are
due to attentional deficits (i.e., that children simply do not look at core aspects of a
scene) or due to constraints stemming from the developing linguistic system itself.
Like the adult comparison group in Bunger et al.’s study, the children fixated
multiple core elements of the scene (e.g., instrument, path). However, this did not
always lead them to mention these aspects, in contrast to the more explicit adults.
The authors conclude that the similar eye-movement patterns yet different linguistic
encoding between the two age groups reflect children’s developing interface between
attention and language production, or their developing linguistic production system
(the latter explanation was also put forward by Norbury, 2014, with respect to
children with language impairment). These findings leave open the possibility that
even if children fixate a crucial aspect of a scene, they may not go on to encode it in
their referring expressions.
Intuitively, in a referential communication paradigm, speakers must look at
competitor objects to identify which features distinguish the target from these other
objects, and to monitor potential ambiguity for the addressee. Deutsch and
Pechmann (1982, p. 178) appealed for research into the link between visual scanning
and referring, and Pechmann (1989, p. 98) proposed incomplete visual scanning as a
reason for failures in informativeness, though did not provide developmental data to
support this. More recently, studies into adults’ pre-articulatory visual scanning
found that fully informative expressions are associated with fixations to a contrast
referent before articulation (Brown-Schmidt & Tanenhaus, 2006; Davies & Kreysa,
20171). In Davies and Kreysa (2017), we showed that speakers were more likely to be
informative when they had fixated the contrast object during multiple temporal
regions and for longer before starting to speak. However, such fixations were not
essential for producing a fully informative utterance: the cooperative adult speaker
has a pragmatic drive to be informative and can use information gleaned from a
number of sources (direct fixation, extrafoveal processing, previous exposure) in
order to provide their addressee with a felicitous referring expression.
Rabagliati and Robertson (2017) examined three- to five-year-olds’ monitoring
processes when producing informative or under-informative expressions to refer to
target objects accompanied by a foil and a distractor object. They investigated
proactive monitoring, i.e., saccades to target and contrast objects before naming.
Unlike the adult comparison group, children across the tested age range did not
typically monitor for potential ambiguity, although they did show some evidence of

1
Like the current study, these investigations into adults’ pre-articulatory visual scanning use a paradigm
that successfully combines language production with eye-tracking, as validated by Griffin (2004), Griffin
and Bock (2000), Meyer, Sleiderink, and Levelt (1998), Vanlangendonck, Willems, Menenti, and
Hagoort (2016), i.a.

monitoring before producing informative expressions. Rabagliati and Robertson

conclude that the absence of proactive monitoring plays an important role in
children’s failure in referential communication tasks. However, since there was inter-
and intra-individual variability in children’s monitoring and informativeness, results
also show that while preschoolers are able to engage in ambiguity monitoring and go
on to produce informative descriptions, they typically fail to do this.
This small body of research shows the potential for eye-tracking studies to help
clarify the relationship between speakers’ ambiguity monitoring and the form of
their referring expressions, and to ultimately reveal the role of visual search in
children’s under-informativeness. We advance this potential by further investigating
lack of visual scanning as a reason for under-informativeness. We aim to reveal more
subtle relationships between visual inspection and attribute encoding across
development by examining the INCIDENCE of contrast fixations as a separate process to
their USE. We ask whether children at different points of development differ in WHEN
contrast fixations become useful. For example, do younger children need more time
between fixating the contrast object and articulating an informative referring
expression than older children? We also measure whether the number of distractor
objects in a visual display compromises children’s ability to comprehensively scan the
scene and/or to refer informatively.
With a more thorough understanding of the role of visual inspection in children’s
referential informativeness, we can move towards an understanding of how children
manage that visual information using their developing executive skills. For effective
referential communication, children must be able to (i) attend to target and
competitor referents, (ii) monitor for ambiguity, (iii) identify precisely what
distinguishes the target from its competitors, (iv) update a situation model based on
referent accessibility from multiple social perspectives, and then (v) encode any
distinguishing features into their chosen referring expression. They may also need to
inhibit prepotent, higher frequency under-informative expressions, e.g., “the car” in a
multiple-car context. Clearly, referential planning is both cognitively and
linguistically demanding: the child must control their attentional resources as well as
accessing the appropriate lexical and syntactic forms.
By measuring selected aspects of children’s linguistic and cognitive abilities (see
‘Materials’ for details of all assessment instruments) in addition to their
eye-movements and chosen referential forms, the current study examines the
cognitive components of referring. To complement the live measurement of
participants’ eye-movements as they refer, we measure their visual search efficiency,
with the prediction that better visual search abilities will be associated with more
informative referring in our task. We also take two measures of linguistic ability:
receptive vocabulary and perspective-taking in a discourse context. Receptive
vocabulary is a key index of language development (Christensen, Zubrick, Lawrence,
Mitrou, & Taylor, 2014), and strong correlations have been found between receptive
vocabulary size and speed of language processing in three- to ten-year-olds
(Borovsky, Elman, & Fernald, 2012). Thus, higher scores in receptive vocabulary may
be associated with more informative referring. The measure of discourse
perspective-taking requires the child to identify characters contrastively where the
addressee cannot see them. Similarly, our task requires a consideration of addressee
needs; the child must understand that their addressee requires a modified noun to
find the target object. Thus, higher scores on the perspective-taking task might be
associated with more informative referring. In sum, we use children’s performance
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Journal of Child Language 5

on these three tasks to investigate drivers of under-informativeness, to complement our

analysis of children’s scanning behaviour before and during their speech production
within the referential task. By doing this, we hope to reveal whether
under-informativeness is more closely associated with children’s developing language
or with their visual search abilities. The tests also act as an additional screen for
participants with an atypical profile. All of the tests are well established and widely
recognised as reliable and valid assessment instruments for capturing their intended
constructs.
Finally, we aim to clarify the developmental trajectory towards habitual informative
referring by comparing performance at different ages. In planning even simple referring
expressions that distinguish a target from a single competitor, there are heavy demands
on children’s developing language and cognitive skills. Multiple skills must be deployed
in the moment: targets must be analysed, ambiguity monitored, and descriptions
planned and produced. Evidence suggests that these component skills are in place
relatively early: five-year-olds can articulate differences using referring expressions
when explicitly asked (Whitehurst & Sonnenschein, 1981); two-year-olds are sensitive
to others’ knowledge states for referential purposes (O’Neill, 1996), and adjective–
noun constructions are within the reach of three- to five-year-olds (Nicoladis, 2002).
However, integrating these skills (or perhaps realising that such integration is
necessary) appears to be a significant challenge for children, since they persist in
spontaneously under-informing into their seventh year (Whitehurst, 1976; though
note that this varies with task demands: Girbau, 2001). Our age groups of interest
capture linguistic, cognitive, and eye-movement profiles at two time-points: at the
stage of habitual under-informativeness (four-year-olds), and once informativeness
begins to stabilise (seven-year-olds).
In sum, our study combines experimental methods from language production
research and those using eye-movements as an index of cognitive processes to
investigate differences in the rate at which children of four and seven years of age
monitor and integrate information about referential ambiguity into their referential
choices. In order to explore the relationship between referential abilities and other
cognitive skills, we also measure children’s linguistic and cognitive profiles outside
the referential domain. We ask three main research questions:

1. What is the developmental trajectory in referential informativeness when

children refer to objects in simple and more complex visual scenes?
2. What are the linguistic and cognitive profiles of children who tend to provide
under-informative referring expressions?
3. Do fixations to contrast objects boost referential informativeness, and how is this
affected by age and visual complexity?

We hypothesise that: (1) Four-year-old children will frequently produce

under-informative referring expressions, whereas seven-year-olds will provide more
informative ones. This difference is hypothesised to be clear in simple displays but
may break down in complex displays where the cognitive demands are greater; (2)
Children who tend to provide under-informative referring expressions will score
lower on tests of language ability or visual search; (3) In both age groups, the
contrast object will be fixated more frequently before informative referring
expressions than before under-informative referring expressions.
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6 Davies and Kreysa

Method
Participants
Twenty-seven four-year-olds and 30 seven-year-olds were recruited from nurseries,
schools, and playschemes in Leeds. Table 1 contains participant profile information.
All were monolingual native speakers of British English, and all had normal or
corrected-to-normal vision and hearing. Each participated voluntarily with the
informed consent of their caregiver, and each child gave their assent before starting
the tasks. In addition, 24 adults were recruited from the University of Leeds for a
separate study with a similar methodology (reported in Davies & Kreysa, 2017). We
refer to this adult data as a comparison to the children’s patterns, and present this
control group data at relevant points to show fully developed referential and visual
behaviour.

Materials: referential communication task

The stimuli consisted of 44 displays of everyday objects, grouped into semantically
related sets, e.g., animals, food, household objects, clothes. Sixteen displays were
critical items, 24 were fillers, and four formed the practice block. Of the critical
items, half of the displays contained four objects and half contained eight objects
(see Figures 1 and 2 for example displays), constituting simple and complex displays,
respectively. All images were presented in grayscale to limit bias from colour salience.
They fitted within areas of interest measuring 300 × 300 pixels (four-object displays)
and 235 × 235 pixels (eight-object displays). Participants were seated 60–70 cm from
the 17-inch monitor screen (1280 × 1024 resolution), and the areas of interest
surrounding each object spanned approximately 7° of visual angle for four-object
displays and 5.5° for eight-object displays. Half of the critical displays were
contrast-absent displays with only one referent of each noun category (e.g., a ball, a
doll, a teddy, and a car). The other half were contrast-present displays featuring two
referents of the same noun category, one of which was the target and thus required
disambiguation (e.g., a large apple, a small apple), as well as two unrelated objects
(e.g., a sausage and a sandwich). Target objects always differed from their contrast

Table 1. Participant Profiles for the Original Sample and after Exclusions from the Eye-movement
Analysis (see ‘Data cleaning’ for exclusion criteria)

Entire sample: analysed for production data and standardised test performance

4-year-olds 7-year-olds Adults

n 27 (13 males) 30 (14 males) 24 (4 males)

mean age (y;m) (sd) 4;7 (0;5) 7;8 (0;6) 19 (1;5)
range 4;0–5;6 (18 mts) 6;9–8;6 (21 mts) 18–23
Subsample analysed for eye-movements
n 23 (12 males) 29 (13 males) 20 (4 males)
mean age (y;m) (sd) 4;7 (0;5) 7;8 (0;6) 18 (4)
range 4;0–5;6 6;9–8;6 18–23

Figure 1. Four-object stimuli. Left panel shows a contrast-absent item and right panel shows a contrast-present
item. Target is highlighted in both panels.

Figure 2. Eight-object stimuli. Left panel shows a contrast-absent item and right panel shows a contrast-present
item. Target is highlighted in both panels.

mates by size (large vs. small); no other adjectives were required or would discriminate
the target from the contrast object. In the four-object displays, the contrast-absent items
contained three distractor objects and the contrast-present items contained two. In the
eight-object displays, the contrast-absent items contained seven distractors and the
contrast-present items contained six. The 16 critical items all appeared in four
pseudo-randomised lists, counterbalanced for target attribute and for block order.
Thus, half the participants saw, e.g., the small apple as the target, while the other
half saw the large apple as the target. No object appeared as target more than once
throughout the experiment, and the position of the target and the contrast objects
was rotated around each slot of the four- and eight-object displays. Stimuli were
presented and eye-movements recorded using Tobii Studio software, v. 3.1.6.
The 24 filler items were of four types: two-object picture displays, two-object
number displays, four-object picture displays, and eight-object picture displays. In
the four- and eight-object filler displays, targets differed from contrast mates by
pattern (stripy vs. spotty). The fillers were partly designed to mask the pattern
inherent in the critical trials, i.e., when a display contained a contrast set, the target
object in the critical trials was necessarily a member of this set. In order to reduce
the likelihood of the children predicting the identity of the critical target before it
was highlighted, half of the filler items featured a target object which was not a
member of the co-present contrast set.
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8 Davies and Kreysa

The sequencing of each trial is depicted in Figure 3. The experiment was conducted
using a Tobii X120 remote desk-mounted eye-tracker, a Dell flat panel monitor visible
to the participant, and a Lenovo W540 laptop running the experimental software,
visible to the experimenter. Participants’ utterances were recorded using an
omnidirectional tabletop microphone. The adult design and procedure was
comparable to the child experiment, though there were double the number of items
and dimensions involved, and the exposure time for the preview and
target-highlighted displays were each 1000 ms shorter. For full details, see Davies and
Kreysa (2017).

Materials: standardised tests

Three standardised tests were administered to correlate participants’ linguistic and
cognitive abilities with their informativeness in the referential communication task.
As an index of receptive language ability, the British Picture Vocabulary Scale
(BPVS-III) was used, normed for three- to sixteen-year-olds (Dunn, Dunn, Styles, &
Sewell, 2009). For visual search efficiency, the Bug Search task from the Wechsler
Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-IV) battery was used (Wechsler,
2013). This is a processing speed subtest for ages 4;0–7;7. It measures participants’
perceptual speed, short-term visual memory, cognitive flexibility, visual discrimination,
and concentration whilst they match one of five images to a reference image. In place
of the WPPSI-IV Bug Search task, the adult comparison group did the visual search
task from the PEBL battery (Mueller, 2014; results reported in Davies & Kreysa, 2017).
As a measure of perspective-taking ability in a discourse context, the Short Narrative
subtest from the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV-ST) was
administered, recommended for use with four- to nine-year-olds (Seymour, Roeper, &
De Villiers, 2003). The scoring system for each instrument is explained in the ‘Results’
section.

Figure 3. Trial sequence: (1) the fixation cross was presented for 1000 ms, followed by; (2) a preview of the
displays without the target highlight (3000 ms for four-object displays; 4000 ms for eight-object displays); (3)
a red fixation cross then appeared within the preview for a further 1000 ms; (4) the fixation cross
disappeared and the target was highlighted with a red frame around the object. This final display remained
visible for 5000 ms, during which time the participant produced their utterance using the form “click on the X”.

Procedure
Participants were tested individually in a quiet room in their nursery, school, or
playscheme setting. The nursery children’s key worker sat with them during their
session. Children were welcomed, briefed on the content of the session, and then
gave their assent. The order of tests was the same for all participants and was as
follows (with approximate durations):

1. The BPVS-III, administered on hard copy according to the manual’s instructions

(10 minutes).
2. Object recognition task. This was a bespoke PowerPoint presentation containing
34 target images from the referential communication task, displaying one object
per slide. These images included all targets from the critical items plus ‘object’
targets from the filler items (i.e., numerals and geometric shapes excluded); see
‘Appendix’ for the list of target objects. Its function was to check that the
children could name all of the objects before the eye-tracking experiment
began. As the child named each object, the experimenter advanced to the next
slide, asking “What’s that?” for each image. All children were able to name all
images (2 minutes).
3. Referential communication task. Participants were seated in front of the eye-tracker
and monitor, with the experimenter seated at the laptop nearby. The two monitors
were not mutually visible. A five-point calibration was performed, then participants
were instructed as follows: We’re going to play a game. Your job is to help me find
some pictures. You’ll see some pictures on the screen. I can see them too, but they’re
not in the same place on my screen. Look at the pictures on your screen. A red box
will appear around one of them for you. You should tell me to click on that picture,
like “click on the dog”. You’ll also see a red star – you should always try to look at the
red star when you can see it. We’ll practise a few times first and then we’ll play the
game. Do you have any questions? […] Are you ready to start practising? We
emphasised that the participants’ role was to tell the experimenter to click on
the highlighted item, and the experimenter-addressee maintained the impression
of being highly motivated to find the objects throughout the course of the
experiment. During the experiment, the experimenter clicked a mouse to signal
that they had found the referent roughly one second after the offset of the
participant’s utterance, regardless of the form of referring expression used. No
other feedback was given. The task was split into four blocks of equal length
with voluntary breaks between (10 minutes).
4. WPPSI-IV Bug Search, administered on hard copy according to the manual’s
instructions (4 minutes).
5. The DELV-ST Short Narrative subtest, administered on hard copy according to
the manual’s instructions (3 minutes).

The children were debriefed, thanked, and received a certificate for their participation.
The whole testing session lasted approximately 30 minutes. The study was approved by
the Faculty Research Ethics Committee at the lead author’s institution.
Data preparation: utterance coding
The utterances were transcribed and coded from the audio-recording made during the
testing session. If a referring expression contained minimally sufficient information for
the addressee to uniquely identify it (i.e., with appropriate modification in the
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10 Davies and Kreysa

contrast-present condition; “click on the big apple”) it was coded as OPTIMAL. If it lacked
such information (e.g., “click on the apple” in the contrast-present condition) it was
coded as UNDER-INFORMATIVE. Since we were interested in participants’ eye-movements
leading up to their first attempt at a referring expression, utterances which were initially
under-informative but subsequently self-corrected to an informative form were coded as
under-informative (e.g., “click on the glasses (.) the big ones”). This applied to six out
of the 432 critical referring expressions in the four-year-olds’ data (1%), and 17 out of
the 480 critical referring expressions in the seven-year-olds’ data (3.5%). Referring
expressions which contained more information than necessary for unique reference
resolution (e.g., “click on the little tie” in a display with a single tie) were coded as
OVER-INFORMATIVE. Utterances which referred to an INCORRECT TARGET were coded as such
and excluded from subsequent analysis: this applied to nine out of the 432 critical
referring expressions in the four-year-olds’ data (2%), and one out of the 480 critical
referring expressions in the seven-year-olds’ data (0.2%). Trials in which the
participants did not respond or gave incomprehensible responses were coded as NO
RESPONSE: this applied to 11 out of the 432 critical referring expressions in the
four-year-olds’ data (2.5%), and three out of the 480 critical referring expressions in the
seven-year-olds’ data (0.6%). Only the optimal, under-informative and over-informative
items went forward for analysis. The other response types were excluded, totalling 6%
of the four-year-olds’ data and 4% of the seven-year-olds’ data.

Data preparation: eye-tracking data

Onsets and offsets of all critical utterances were calculated using the Sound Finder
function in Audacity (Audacity Team, 2014), and then manually checked and
adjusted where required (e.g., where the function had falsely detected a background
noise as the speaker’s voice). These timestamps were merged into the eye-tracking
data exports to provide utterance duration information. By cross-referencing
utterance duration information with the timestamps for onsets and offsets of each
visual stimulus, we split the data into four temporal regions: preview, pre-utterance,
utterance, and post-utterance. The PREVIEW temporal region was the period between
the array first appearing and the target being highlighted (i.e., Screen 2 in Figure 3).
The PRE-UTTERANCE temporal region was the period between the target being
highlighted and the speaker beginning their utterance. The utterance and the
post-utterance temporal regions were not analysed so will not be discussed further.
Areas of interest (hereafter ‘objects’) in the displays were coded as Target, Contrast
(if present), and Distractor. Fixation counts and fixation durations to each object during
each temporal region were then derived.2 Finally, the referential form coding
(under-informative; informative) was merged with the eye-tracking data.

Results
Referential communication task: production data
For measuring the form of referring expressions from participants’ production data
(hypothesis 1), the experiment had a 2 × 2 × 2 design (age group × contrast × display
2
For fixations which spanned two or three temporal regions, each region was allocated half or a third of a
fixation, respectively. Fixation duration was defined to include individual fixations, gazes, and refixations of
an object within one temporal region.

complexity). Age group varied between participants (four-year-olds; seven-year-olds).

Visual contrast (present; absent) and display complexity (four-objects; eight-objects)
were manipulated within participants. The dependent variable was the mean
percentage of each participant’s referring expressions at each level of informativeness:
% under-informative, % optimally informative, and % over-informative.
In an analysis of all production data (contrast-present and contrast-absent
conditions; four- and eight-object displays, see Table 2), four-year-olds were
equivocal in the informativeness of their referring expressions (under-informative
M = 42%, SD = 13; informative M = 52%, SD = 10),3 whereas seven-year-olds were
more frequently informative in their referential choices (under-informative M = 18%,
SD = 15; informative M = 73%, SD = 15).4
Because over-informativeness was rare in the data, statistical comparisons focus on
rates of optimal informativeness vs. under-informativeness. Hence, only the
contrast-present condition went forward for further analysis, since it is not possible
to examine under-informativeness in the contrast-absent condition (where a bare
noun would constitute informative referring). In addition, the contrast-present
condition is in focus due to its importance in the eye-movement analysis.
Figure 4 shows the mean rates of informativeness as a percentage of all expressions
produced, by age group and display complexity; contrast-present condition only. For
comparison, Figure 4 also includes the rates of informativeness in the adult control
group, though the statistical analysis is reported for the two child groups only (see
Davies & Kreysa, 2017, for details of the adult data). Collapsing across the two levels
of display complexity, four-year-olds were largely under-informative in their
referential choices (83% under-informative and 12% informative), whereas
seven-year-olds were more frequently informative (37% under-informative and 63%
informative). The adults were largely informative at a mean rate of 79%. A two-way
mixed-measures ANOVA with the factors age and display complexity found a main
effect of age on informativeness (F(1,55) = 47.27, p < .001, η2p = .46). There was also
a main effect of display complexity on informativeness, such that participants were
significantly more informative with four- than with eight-object displays (see Table 1
for means and SDs) (F(1,55) = 38.2, p < .001, η2p = .41). Finally, there was a
significant interaction between age and complexity, i.e., increased display complexity
compromised informativeness for the seven-year-olds to a greater extent than the
four-year-olds (F(1,55) = 13.52, p = .001, η2p = .2). This is likely driven by floor effects
in the younger group.5
As predicted by our first hypothesis, the younger children were largely
under-informative when referring to objects. Their older counterparts were less so,

3
Of the remaining 6%, 2% were over-informative and 4% were excluded due to references to the incorrect
target, no response, or incomprehensible response.
4
Of the remaining 9%, 8% were over-informative and 1% were excluded due to references to the incorrect
target, no response, or incomprehensible response.
5
The production data were also analysed using the reduced sample included in the eye-movement
analysis (see Table 1 for details of the subsample). Behavioural effects were not quantifiably changed in
this smaller sample. As in the full sample, the four-year-olds were largely under-informative in their
referential choices (84% under-informative and 14% informative), whereas the seven-year-olds were
more frequently informative (38% under-informative and 62% informative). Both main effects and the
interaction held in the original direction, i.e., age on informativeness (F(1,50) = 35.51, p < .001, η2p = .42);
display complexity on informativeness (F(1,50) = 34.2, p < .001, η2p = .41); age and complexity on
informativeness (F(1,50) = 10.01, p < .01, η2p = .17).

All displays (four-

Four-object Eight-object and eight-objects
displays displays combined)

4yos 7yos 4yos 7yos 4yos 7yos

Contrast-absent condition only: mean % (sd)

Under-informative 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0)
Optimally informative 94 (11) 85 (18) 89 (19) 80 (24) 92 (12) 82 (16)
Over-informative 2 (7) 13 (17) 6 (16) 19 (24) 4 (11) 16 (17)
Contrast-present condition only: mean % (sd)
Under-informative 81 (30) 22 (33) 86 (24) 52 (32) 83 (25) 37 (30)
Optimally informative 16 (29) 78 (34) 8 (24) 48 (32) 12 (25) 63 (30)
Over-informative 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0)
Total (combined contrast-present and contrast-absent conditions: mean % (sd))
Under-informative 40 (15) 11 (17) 43 (12) 26 (16) 42 (13) 18 (15)
Optimally informative 55 (14) 81 (17) 48 (9) 64 (17) 52 (10) 73 (15)
Over-informative 1 (3) 7 (9) 3 (8) 10 (12) 2 (5) 8 (8)

Figure 4. Mean rates of informativeness as a percentage of expressions produced, by age group and display
complexity; contrast-present condition only.

though not to the extent of adult speakers. Both child groups produced fewer
informative expressions when displays were complex, and this effect was more
pronounced in the older group.

Relationships between rates of informativeness and performance on standardised

tests
This analysis tests the relationship between rates of informativeness of the children’s
referring expressions (as a percentage of each child’s referring expressions) and their
performance on the standardised tests.

Scoring of the test battery

For the BPVS-III, raw and standardised scores were calculated using the test manual.
Performance on the DELV-ST was a score out of 7. For the WPPSI-IV Bug Search
visual search task, we counted the total number of items matched correctly within
the time limit of 2 minutes, as per the manual. As expected, the four-year-old group
scored significantly lower than their seven-year-old peers on the BPVS (raw scores),
the DELV, and the Bug Search. Notably, the four-year-olds scored significantly
higher than their older peers on the BPVS relative to age norms (standardised
scores), suggesting that the younger sample had relative strengths in receptive
vocabulary. All effect sizes were small. Scores are shown in Table 3.

Correlational analyses
A Pearson correlation coefficient was computed to assess the relationship between
informativeness of referring expressions (contrast-present condition only) and
performance on the standardised tests. Within each child group, there were no
significant correlations between the proportion of referring expressions that were
under-informative and any of the standardised measures, (all ps > .1; all rs < .3).
This was the case when correlations were run across the two levels of display
complexity, and when the four-object and eight-object conditions were analysed
separately. Thus, our second hypothesis was not supported. That is, the
informativeness of children’s referring expressions is not associated with their
receptive language ability, their narrative ability, or their visual search capabilities, as
measured using the selected tools. This lack of significant associations may have been
due to the minimal variance in the informativeness rates in both the four-year-old
and the seven-year-old groups.
Note that when correlations were run across the entire child sample (n = 57), we
found significant positive correlations between informativeness and scores on the
BPVS (raw) (r = 0.58, p < .001), scores on the DELV (r = 0.39, p < .01), and scores on
the Bug Search (r = 0.55, p < .001). No relationship was found between
informativeness and BPVS (standardised) (r = –0.19, p = .16). That is, the higher the
children scored on tests of receptive vocabulary, narrative ability, and visual search,
the higher their rates of informativeness. However, since these correlations did not
remain once age was controlled (all ps > .7; all rs < 0.05), nor were they significant
within each age group, age appears to be driving the relationship in the whole
sample: older children tend to be more informative and score higher on the tests
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14
Davies and Kreysa
Table 3. Scores on Standardised Tests: Mean (SD).

Children

4-year-olds 7-year-olds t df p Cohen’s d Adults

BPVS (raw) 74.1 (11) 108 (14.4) −10.0 55 < .001 2.65 161.3 (4.1)
range 54–99 83–140 151–167
BPVS (standardised) 109.3 (6.9) 102.6 (12) 2.60 47 < .05 0.68 111.4 (7.4)
range 91–124 81–126 96–124
DELV (narrative) 3.5 (1.6) 6 (1.1) −6.77 47 < .001 1.82 5.8 (1.2)
range 1–7 2–7 3–7
WPPSI-IV Bug Search (raw) 21.9 (8.7) 41.5 (7.3) −9.15 54 < .001 2.44 –
range 6–42 29–60 –
Journal of Child Language 15

because their abilities in all areas improve with age, rather than their informativeness
and language/cognitive abilities being directly related.

Eye-movement data
For measuring the relationship between eye-movements and informativeness
(hypothesis 3), each analysis used a different combination of predictor and outcome
variables. Since the eye-movement analyses focused on looks to the contrast object
(which was of course absent in the contrast-absent condition), only the
contrast-present level of this variable was retained. The first analysis ( proportion of
contrast-fixated trials resulting in informative expressions) took age, visual complexity,
and presence or absence of fixations to the contrast object during two temporal
regions (preview; pre-utterance) as predictors, and utterance type as outcome
(though only with two levels: under-informative and informative: over-informative
trials were excluded due to their low frequency in the data). The second analysis
( proportion of under-informative trials preceded by a contrast fixation) took age and
presence of contrast fixations as predictors (with the two temporal regions analysed
separately) and utterance type as outcome. The third analysis (contrast fixation
duration) took age and utterance type as predictors, and total fixation duration to
the contrast object during the same temporal regions as the outcome.

Data cleaning
Since the eye-movement analyses focus on fixations to the contrast object, the
contrast-absent condition is not considered here. Five participants (four from the
four-year-old group; one seven-year-old) were wholly excluded from the eye-tracking
analysis since in each of these cases less than 20% of the samples recorded by the
eye-tracker were usable, leaving the remaining participant samples at n = 23 and n =
29 for the younger and older groups respectively (see Table 1 for details). A more
conservative cut-off (< 50%) had previously been used in analysing the adult data,
thus four adult participants were also excluded from the eye-tracking analyses.
In addition, 19 individual trials from the four-year-olds’ data and 28 trials from the
seven-year-olds’ data had to be removed from the eye-movement analyses for one of five
reasons: (i) no oral response; (ii) early articulation, i.e., a participants’ utterance
occurred before the target was revealed; (iii) late articulation, i.e., the utterance
started after the offset of the target display; (iv) the incorrect target was referred to;
(v) over 50% of the samples in the eye-tracking data for a particular trial had validity
codes of 4-4, signalling that neither eye was found by the eye-tracker. After these
exclusions, 90% of the four-year-olds’ original dataset and 88% of the
seven-year-olds’ were included in the analyses.

Proportion of contrast-fixated trials resulting in informative expressions (combined

pre-articulatory regions)
As an initial course-grained measure of the relationship between fixation of the contrast
object and speaker informativeness, we analysed the proportion of valid trials in which
children in each age group fixated the contrast object during the preview and
pre-utterance temporal regions before they produced an informative vs.
under-informative utterance, by display complexity. Trials that were invalid in one or
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16 Davies and Kreysa

both of these temporal regions were excluded, leaving 70% of the four-year-olds’
original dataset and 69% of the seven-year-olds’.
This analysis allows us to examine the role of contrast fixations as a predictor of
informativeness. We focused on those trials which contained a contrast fixation in
either the preview region, the pre-utterance region, or both. This represented 80% of
the four-year-olds’ valid trials, 88% of the seven-year-olds’ valid trials, and 80% of
the adults’ valid trials (n = 102, n = 142, and n = 235, respectively).
As Figure 5 shows, when four-year-olds fixated the contrast object, they seldom went
on to use it in their referring expressions (only 17% of contrast-fixated trials were
informative across display complexity conditions). A clear difference can be seen in
the seven-year-olds, who frequently went on to use the information from the
contrast fixation in their expressions (69% of contrast-fixated trials were informative
across display complexity conditions). Adults almost always went on to use the
information from the contrast fixation in their expressions (83% of contrast-fixated
trials were informative across display complexity conditions). Importantly, although
the older children’s rate of informativeness is in line with the adults’ for the
four-object displays, they were significantly hampered from reaching adult levels by
the eight-object displays. A chi-square analysis reveals a significant association
between informativeness and display complexity in the seven-year-olds (χ 2(1) =
11.13, p = .001, Cramer’s V = .28, odds ratio = 1.97), with no association between
informativeness and complexity for the four-year-olds (χ 2(1) = 0.03, n.s.) or the
adults (χ 2(1) = 0.007, n.s.).

Figure 5. Proportion of all trials with pre-articulatory contrast fixations which resulted in informative or
under-informative referring expressions, by age and display complexity. Since the percentages are based on
an absolute frequency out of all trials (i.e., not averaged over participants or trials), there is no variance to
report.

This analysis suggests that the four-year-olds struggled to integrate the information
they gleaned from fixating the contrast during utterance planning. Despite looking at
the contrast object, they did not go on to provide fully informative expressions in the
same trial. On the other hand, contrast fixations boosted informativeness for the
seven-year-olds who, like adults, were able to use the information from the contrast
object in their ensuing informative expressions. However, in contrast to adults, the
older children’s informativeness was significantly compromised by display complexity.

Proportion of under-informative trials preceded by a contrast fixation (separated by

pre-articulatory regions)
Since we found a clear by-age difference in the relationship between fixation pattern and
informativeness above, a finer-grained measure of fixation pattern over separate
temporal regions was used to further examine the effect of age on the use of contrast
fixations in informativeness. Here we focus on the number of trials in which children
in each age group fixated the contrast object during the preview, pre-utterance, both,
or neither temporal region before producing an under-informative utterance, as a
proportion of all valid trials. The two display complexity conditions were combined
to boost power since there were low counts of optimally informative utterances for
the younger group (see Table 4).
Trials were categorised as showing one of four fixation patterns: a contrast fixation
in: (i) neither the preview nor the pre-utterance region; (ii) the preview region alone;
(iii) the pre-utterance region alone; and (iv) both the preview and the pre-utterance
regions. Trial frequencies of each fixation and utterance type are shown in Table 4,
with proportions shown in Figure 6.
The mean proportions of under-informative utterances by fixation pattern were
calculated and are shown in Figure 6. For example, for the four-year-olds, 82% of all
trials involving a contrast fixation in both the preview and the pre-utterance region
were under-informative. Data from the adults is shown for comparison, though only
the child groups are included in the reported statistical analyses (full adult analysis
reported in Davies & Kreysa, 2017).
To analyse the role of contrast fixations in the informativeness of the subsequent
utterance, we used generalised linear mixed effects models assuming a binomial
distribution. Statistical analyses were performed using R (R Core Team, 2015), in
particular the lme4 package (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2015). Unless
otherwise mentioned, mixed effects analyses were conducted on the basis of initial
maximal models, including random intercepts for both participants and items, and
random slopes with all fixed factors. Models were fitted by maximum likelihood,
with log-likelihood ratio tests ascertaining whether the interactions in the
fixed-effects structure improved model fit for the maximal compared to simpler
models. Where this was not the case, interactions were removed from both the fixed
and the random parts of the models.
Each age group was analysed separately. The models predicted the occurrence of an
under-informative utterance based on the temporal region(s, if any) in which the
contrast object was fixated. In all cases, the four contrast fixation patterns (neither,
preview, pre-utterance, both) were dummy-coded with ‘both’ as the reference level.
The models thus included contrast fixation pattern as a fixed effect and participants
and items as random effects, i.e., informativeness contrast fixation + (1 | ppt) + (1 |
item). Convergence was achieved using the bobyqa optimiser.
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18
Davies and Kreysa
Table 4. Frequency of Valid Trials of Each Fixation Pattern and Each Utterance Type

4-year-olds 7-year-olds

Temporal region containing a contrast fixation Informative Under-informative Total Informative Under-informative Total

Neither 1 25 26 7 12 19
Preview 7 19 26 17 14 31
Pre-utterance 1 24 25 13 13 26
Both 9 42 51 68 17 85
TOTALS 18 110 128 105 56 161
Journal of Child Language 19

Figure 6. Mean proportions of under-informative trials following contrast fixation patterns across preview and
pre-utterance temporal regions. Error bars show ± 1 SE.

Overall, as depicted in Figure 6, four-year-olds were equally likely to be

under-informative regardless of fixation pattern. That is, they produced similarly
high rates of under-informativeness when they fixated the contrast object in both the
preview and the pre-utterance regions as when they fixated it in neither region
(estimate = 1.51, SE = 1.58, p = .34); in the preview region only (estimate = –0.86, SE =
1.20, p = .48), or in the pre-utterance region only (estimate = 2.70, SE = 2.62, p = .30).
Thus, the younger children’s referring expressions tended to be under-informative
regardless of their pre-articulatory scanning behaviour. Conversely, seven-year-olds
were significantly less likely to be under-informative when they fixated the contrast
object in both the preview and the pre-utterance regions as when they fixated it in
neither region (estimate = 1.61, SE = 0.77, p = .04); in the preview region only
(estimate = 1.18, SE = 0.58, p = .04), and in the pre-utterance region only (estimate =
1.37, SE = 0.66, p = .04). In other words, the older children were most likely to
produce an under-informative expression if they did not previously fixate the
contrast object in either temporal region, and least likely to produce an
under-informative expression if they fixated it in both; just like the adult comparison
group.
In summary, this binary analysis of contrast fixations in preview and pre-utterance
temporal regions reveals stark differences between younger and older children.
Four-year-olds are highly likely to be under-informative regardless of the
comprehensiveness of their visual scan, whereas seven-year-olds showed more
effective use of information from the contrast object in their choice of referring
expression. If the older children never fixated the contrast object, they were most
likely to be under-informative, and looking at it in both preview and pre-utterance
regions was most effective at reducing under-informativeness. This pattern is broadly
similar to the adults although, unlike the seven-year-olds, fixations in the
pre-utterance region alone did help adults to reduce under-informativeness.

Contrast fixation duration

Focusing on those trials which contained a contrast fixation, an additional analysis of
fixation duration to the contrast object corroborated the binary findings above (i.e.,
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20 Davies and Kreysa

fixation vs. no fixation across two temporal regions). Linear mixed effects models
investigated the influence of age and informativeness on fixation duration to the
contrast object during the preview and pre-utterance temporal regions combined.
Again, data from the adults is shown for comparison, though only the child groups
are included in the reported statistical analyses. Since there were 45 trials in which
children did not fixate the contrast object at all in these regions, we excluded those
trials from this analysis. Three outlying trials with fixation durations of > 3000 ms
were also excluded, leaving 83% of the prepared dataset. The model included the two
fixed factors (age and informativeness), their interaction, and random intercepts for
participants and items: fixation duration to contrast age * informativeness + (1+ |
ppt) + (1 | item).
During the combined preview and pre-utterance regions, the four-year-olds (M =
1037 ms, SD = 712) fixated the contrast for longer than the seven-year-olds (M = 887 ms,
SD = 587; age coefficient = –233.7, SE = 96.8, t = –2.41), regardless of informativeness.
Both age groups fixated the contrast object for longer before producing an informative
utterance (M = 1004 ms, SD = 643) than before producing an under-informative utterance
(M = 899 ms, SD = 643; informativeness coefficient = –211.1, SE = 93.8, t = –2.25).
Although Figure 7 suggests that this pattern is more marked in the seven-year-olds
(informative M = 988 ms, SD = 617; under-informative M = 664 ms, SD = 444) than
the four-year-olds (informative M = 1107 ms, SD = 801; under-informative M = 1023 ms,
SD = 698: informativeness coefficient = –216.2, SE = 120.7, t = –1.79), the interaction was
not significant (t = –0.99). However, it seems clear that longer looks to the contrast object
before speaking are associated with informativeness, particularly in the older children.

Figure 7. Mean total fixation duration to the contrast object during the preview and pre-utterance regions, by
age group and informativeness. Error bars show ± 1 SE.

As the contrast fixation analyses suggest, children at four and at seven years of age
marginally differed in how long they fixated contrast objects. Distractor fixations were
also monitored to provide a measure of how much the children were scanning the
display generally. On average, four-year-olds and seven-year-olds showed a similar
pattern of fixation durations between areas of interest, with distractor items being
fixated least (see Figure 8). Adults also fixated the distractors the least of all areas of
interest, though they showed a more marked preference for the target than the two
child groups.

Summary of eye-movement findings

The three main analyses reported above converge to suggest that, despite fixating the
contrast object in visual displays, four-year-olds don’t encode distinguishing
information into their referring expressions, whereas their older peers show a
significant boost to informativeness from their pre-articulatory contrast fixations.
First, an analysis of informativeness by age group and display complexity shows that,
despite looking at the contrast object before speaking, four-year-olds did not go on
to provide fully informative expressions. Conversely, the seven-year-olds used the
information from their contrast fixations in simple displays in their ensuing
informative expressions, like adults. However, as shown by their limited
informativeness in complex displays, the older children still have some way to go to
match adult integration levels. Second, an analysis of the presence of contrast
fixations in the preview and pre-utterance regions shows that, regardless of whether
four-year-olds fixated in both temporal regions or in neither of them, the majority of
their referring expressions were under-informative. On the other hand, and in line
with the adult comparison group, fixating the contrast in both regions significantly

Figure 8. Mean total fixation duration to each area of interest during the preview and pre-utterance regions, by
age. Error bars show ± 1 SE.

reduced seven-year-olds’ rates of under-informativeness, and conversely, neglecting to

look at it at all significantly impaired their ability to be fully informative. Finally,
longer looks to the contrast object in the preview and pre-utterance regions are
associated with informativeness, especially in the older children. Taken together,
these findings robustly show that, at four years old, children tend to be
under-informative regardless of looking behaviour whereas, three years later, contrast
fixations facilitate informative utterances.

Discussion
How does children’s visual scanning behaviour influence the informativeness of their
referring expressions? As a first step to answering this question, we ascertained that
our sample of four-year-olds produced under-informative expressions 83% of the
time when referring to objects in a display containing a contrast, whereas their
seven-year-old peers did so just 37% of the time. Having to apprehend more
complex displays increased rates of under-informativeness in both age groups,
though it penalised the older children more heavily, since they had a higher baseline
rate to fall from. Both the age and complexity findings support our first hypothesis,
and replicate previous production studies, which found a developmental shift from
under-informativeness to full informativeness as children mature (Davies & Katsos,
2010; Matthews et al., 2007; Whitehurst & Sonnenschein, 1981, i.a.).
Of the various reasons proposed in the literature for younger children’s
under-informativeness, we focused on the association between visually scanning the
display during utterance planning – specifically looking at the contrast object – and
the ensuing informativeness of referring expressions. By examining children’s
eye-movements as they previewed visual stimuli and planned their expressions, we
have shown that, although children looked at the contrast object at least once in the
majority of trials, younger children did not encode the critical information in their
referring expressions. Thus, we discount the suggestion that it is a lack of contrast
fixations that causes referential informativeness in young children (Deutsch &
Pechmann, 1982; Pechmann, 1989). As our data show, younger children indeed
allocate attention to a contrasting object, but nevertheless these contrast fixations do
not appear to be associated with their informativeness in any way. Whether they
fixate the contrast object in both pre-articulatory regions or not at all, and regardless
of the length of their fixations, four-year-old children largely produce
under-informative referring expressions. However, this pattern changes by the time
children reach seven years of age, when rates of informativeness rise significantly in
our task (approaching adult levels for the simple displays), and contrast fixations and
referential informativeness become positively associated. Thus, we find that
four-year-olds omit critical linguistic information despite having inspected its visual
representation; a pattern in line with Bunger et al.’s (2012) findings on visual scene
inspection and the encoding of manner and path information. Our results also
accord with Rabagliati and Robertson’s findings that young children “fail to take
heed of any ambiguity in the world around them” (2017, p. 24). Children have a
latent ability to notice potential ambiguity, yet neglect to provide disambiguating
information for their addressee. The current study extends Rabagliati and
Robertson’s study by finding a developmental difference in the use of contrast
information during proactive monitoring, refining our third hypothesis to reveal a
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Journal of Child Language 23

developmental difference not in the incidence of contrast fixations, but in the use of
them in producing informative referring expressions.
Thus, in terms of behaviour during the early stages of reference production, the
critical skill for full informativeness is the integration of information from an initial
visual search. As shown by the second eye-movement analysis, seven-year-old
children are able to integrate information from a preview stage (i.e., even before the
identity of the target is known) to produce informative referring expressions.
Although this suggests they need a longer ‘run-up’ than adults (who find contrast
fixations just before the utterance as helpful for informativeness as fixating it in both
the preview and pre-utterance regions; Davies & Kreysa, 2017), perhaps due to
slower speed of processing or needing more time for speech planning, it highlights
older children’s ability to hold referential information in mind while attending to
visual information and planning their eventual referential form. However, this is
harder to achieve when displays are complex; in these cases, older children struggle
to encode the distinguishing information even when they have fixated the contrast
object. We suggest that the additional objects in the display impose extra processing
demands, which may cause children to revert to referring to target objects in
absolute rather than relative terms. The lack of ANY modifying adjective in these
trials – even incorrect or non-distinguishing ones – suggests that the extra visual
complexity may curtail the necessary linguistic complexity in spontaneous referring.
Interestingly, Whitehurst and Sonnenschein (1981) successfully elicited fully
informative expressions requiring comparisons of complex arrays from five-year-olds,
but only when the children were explicitly instructed to make such comparisons.
So what is it that prevents younger children from integrating visual information into
their expressions? One possibility is that these children are more likely to talk about an
element of a scene that has captured their attention. Recall that the target was
highlighted using a red square; a salient cue that may have overshadowed the rest of
the array even when the contrast object had been previously inspected. This
explanation is in line with Bunger at al.’s (2012, p. 147) suggestion that adults are
“able to suppress their excitement about particular event components in the interest
of providing fully informative event descriptions”. Here we can extend such an
explanation to children just three years older than those four-year-olds who could
not stop themselves describing the highlighted target on its own merits, rather than
relative to contrast objects, as required for felicitous referring. This susceptibility to a
‘see-it-say it’ strategy may be caused by a tendency in younger children to use
adjectives descriptively rather than contrastively (though their low rate of
over-informative referring casts doubt on this as a sole explanation). More likely,
their narrow focus is related to immature executive function skills, e.g., inhibitory
control, which we turn to below. A more gradient, though complementary,
explanation is that children and adults differ in the AMOUNT of visual attention
required for eventual integration into informative utterances, as shown by our analysis
of fixation duration where both child groups spent almost twice as long as the adults
fixating the contrast object before producing an informative utterance. Interestingly, an
analysis of speech onset time between the child groups suggests that although
four-year-olds were slower (M = 1819 ms, SD = 607) to start producing their utterances
than the seven-year olds were (M = 1520 ms, SD = 308; age coefficient = –333.9, SE =
98.9, t = –3.4), this didn’t enable them to match their older peers’ informativeness.
Follow-up work which increases the salience of the difference between target and

contrast, or that allows children more time to attend to it, would shed light on the role of
timing in informative reference.
Counter to our second hypothesis, we did not find a contributory role for receptive
vocabulary, narrative ability (both used as indices of language ability), or visual search
capabilities towards referential informativeness at either age-point. Note, however, that
there was limited within-group variance in the informativeness rates, which may have
contributed to the null results for the correlation analysis. We would welcome further
investigation of the role of linguistic and visual search skills in referential tasks designed
to elicit more variable rates of informativeness in older groups, e.g., referential
communication tasks that require two modifiers for unique disambiguation.
Additionally, the use of computational cognitive models that specify the relationships
between linguistic and cognitive processes would also be a productive means of
investigating the interplay of these factors, as well as the role of individual differences
(for example in ACT-R; Hendriks, 2016).
Although we didn’t measure our participants’ executive functioning skills, an
interesting future direction would be to assess whether executive functioning
moderates the relationship between contrast fixations and informativeness of the
referential phrase. That is, it may be the case that only those children with good
executive functioning are able to make use of the information gleaned from the
contrast object.6 Executive functioning is a set of cognitive skills which has been
frequently linked to performance in referential tasks, e.g., the ability to mentally
maintain or manipulate information (i.e., working memory), to withhold a dominant
response (inhibitory control), or to shift representations (i.e., cognitive flexibility)
(see De Cat, 2015, for a review). Studies by, e.g., Bacso and Nilsen (2017), Nilsen
and Graham (2009), and Nilsen, Varghese, Xu, and Fecica (2015) suggest that greater
working memory enables children to more effectively hold features of a target object
in mind and compare them with contrasting objects (see also Hendriks, 2016, for
supporting evidence from cognitive modelling). Similarly, previous research has
implied that stronger cognitive flexibility enables children to notice multiple
dimensions of an object (e.g., that a sock is both long and stripy) and to produce an
expression that captures the critical dimension(s) (Bacso & Nilsen, 2017). Inhibitory
control has also been found to relate to referential informativeness (Wardlow, 2013),
and although the current study does not have data to corroborate this, it is feasible
that the see-it-say-it strategy mentioned above might be minimised with better
inhibitory control as children get older. An age-related boost in executive function
skills might help children scan the critical objects, hold them in mind, suppress
prepotent responses, and then consistently encode relevant information to produce
felicitous expressions.
Like many referential interactions, our task required use of a communicative partner’s
perspective. The interactive experimental set-up was designed to encourage participants
to describe the target object for the addressee rather than merely describing the scene
generally, e.g., the imperative sentence frame that the child was instructed to use
(“click on the X”), the presence of a live addressee, instructions emphasising that the
child’s job was to help the addressee, information about what the addressee could and
couldn’t see, and the addressee’s clear motivation to find the correct object in response
to the child’s instructions. Despite these aspects of the design, the children may not
have realised that the identity of the target object was unknown to the addressee
6
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

before they produced their referring expression. Indeed, the high frequency of
under-informativeness by the younger children in our sample accords with other work
finding that children overuse forms that imply accessibility of the referent to their
addressee (De Cat, 2015, p. 278). However, children may make these apparent
mis-estimates of accessibility, or fail to take their addressee’s perspective into account,
not for reasons of erroneous higher-level situation modelling, but due to problems in
integrating discourse information at a more basic level. That is, they may realise that
their partner needs a modified description, but are simply unable to maintain
activation of contrast information while planning their utterances. Consequently, they
fail to meet the pragmatic expectation and end up describing the target in absolute
terms. This may be exacerbated in situations where communicative demands are
higher, e.g., novel scenarios with less supportive contexts and more aspects to integrate
(Allen et al., 2015, p. 134). Experimental situations involve many of these demands;
testing between these artificial vs. more naturalistic contexts may reveal further
executive function-related explanations for children’s referential inadequacy.
One potential limitation of our study is that participants received no feedback other
than a mouse-click, regardless of the referential form they produced, to signal that a
referent had been found and that they could move on to the next item. This liberal
acceptance of any utterance they produced might have particularly encouraged the
resource-poorer younger speakers to use unmodified expressions over the course of
the experiment, because the addressee seemed to be satisfied with the given
descriptions. However, there was no difference in rates of unmodified expressions
between items in the first and in the second half of the experiment for either the
four-year olds (t(26) = 0.47, p = .65) or the seven-year-olds (t(29) = –0.36, p = .72),
suggesting that lack of feedback was not a contributing factor in rates of
under-informativeness. Nevertheless, if we reframe informative reference as the
avoidance of MISUNDERSTANDING (Hendriks, 2017) instead of the avoidance of
ambiguity, children’s under-informative behaviour in this task starts to appear more
rational than it initially appears. Further, since participants were always in the
speaker role, they did not receive effective models, or experience what it is like to
receive inadequate expressions. This is not just a methodological point. It has been
shown that children learn to avoid ambiguity from precise (caregiver) feedback
(Abbot-Smith et al., 2016; Bacso & Nilsen, 2017; Matthews et al., 2007, 2012;
Wardlow & Heyman, 2016), so even within the course of a single experiment that
includes feedback and/or modelling, increased rates of informativeness can emerge,
mediated by executive function skills. Such a paradigm could produce a rather
different picture with regard to the link between contrast fixations and
informativeness. However, despite the lack of incentive to be maximally informative
and the lack of effective modelling, the older children’s drive to be informative did
not appear to be compromised in our study (cf. Varghese & Nilsen, 2013).
Participants were instructed that their role was to help a real, physically co-present
addressee to find the objects, which may have compensated for the lack of feedback,
at least for the older children.
There is a trend in the results which calls into question the assumption that the
contrast object must be fixated for an informative expression to occur. As reported in
our second eye-movement analysis, 96% of the younger children’s and 63% of the
older children’s trials without a contrast fixation were under-informative. This means
that 4% of the younger and 37% of the older children’s trials were in fact informative
despite not having fixated the contrast object in either the preview or pre-utterance
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terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000120
26 Davies and Kreysa

temporal region. This suggests that, at least for the older children, it is possible to
produce an informative referring expression without having directly checked the
contrast before articulation. This pattern is even more pronounced for the adult
comparison group at 62% informativeness without a prior contrast fixation (discussed
in depth in Davies & Kreysa, 2017). This ability may be due to either (i) extrafoveal
processing of the contrast object or (ii) late fixations to it during articulation. Whilst
beyond the scope of the current paper, this line of reasoning points to a further
age-related difference in the use of contrast information, i.e., that contrast fixations
are helpful but not essential for full informativeness as speakers mature.
It has been repeatedly shown that young children are frequently under-informative
in their referential behaviour. At the same time, there is ample evidence that composite
skills for informative reference are in place from an early age. For example,
22-month-olds react to newness and communicate more about what is new (O’Neill
& Happé, 2000); two-year-olds adapt their communicative behaviour depending on
their assessment of the knowledge of others (O’Neill, 1996) and can be trained to
produce fully informative expressions (Matthews et al., 2007); and five-year-olds can
track what is accessible to their interlocutor (Nadig & Sedivy, 2002). The current
study has extended this list of prerequisite skills by showing that, by four years of
age, children are able to engage in comprehensive visual scanning. However, it may
take another three years for them to manage these skills in unison and alongside
fully-fledged linguistic output.
Acknowledgements. We thank the children, families, and staff of Oakwood Acorns and Holly House
nurseries, Ducklings childcare, Kerr Mackie Primary School, and Children’s Corner’s Chillout Club (all
of Leeds) for their participation. We gratefully acknowledge assistance from Clara Andrés-Roqueta for
creating the stimuli (originally used in Davies, Andrés-Roqueta, & Norbury, 2016), Tara Evans for data
collection, transcription, and preparation, Jessica Dealey for data transcription and preparation, and
Chris Norton for preparing the eye-tracking data. Many thanks to Pirita Pyykkönen-Klauck and Gerry
Altmann for guidance during the early stages of this study, Cécile De Cat for discussion and comments
on earlier drafts, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The study was funded by
a British Academy Quantitative Skills grant awarded to the first author (grant reference SQ120012).

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Appendix: images used in the object recognition task

apple fish sofa/settee

ball glasses sock
bed hand star/starfish
boots/wellies hat stool
brush/toothbrush lemon tape/sellotape
cat pants/trousers teddy
chair pear tie/scarf
cloud penguin toilet
coat piggy bank/pig tree
cow sausage t-shirt
cushion/blanket scissors
dress shoe/high-heel

Cite this article: Davies C, Kreysa H (2018). Look before you speak: children’s integration of visual
information into informative referring expressions Journal of Child Language 1–28. https://doi.org/
10.1017/S0305000918000120

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Davies Kreysa JCL 2018

Uploaded by

Davies Kreysa JCL 2018

Uploaded by

Journal of Child Language (2018), 1–28

Look before you speak: children’s integration

(Received 3 August 2017; revised 8 December 2017; accepted 27 March 2018)

Keywords: referring expressions; language production; eye-tracking

In learning to communicate effectively, children must learn to refer to objects

monitoring before producing informative expressions. Rabagliati and Robertson

on these three tasks to investigate drivers of under-informativeness, to complement our

1. What is the developmental trajectory in referential informativeness when

We hypothesise that: (1) Four-year-old children will frequently produce

Materials: referential communication task

4-year-olds 7-year-olds Adults

n 27 (13 males) 30 (14 males) 24 (4 males)

Materials: standardised tests

1. The BPVS-III, administered on hard copy according to the manual’s instructions

Data preparation: eye-tracking data

complexity). Age group varied between participants (four-year-olds; seven-year-olds).

All displays (four-

4yos 7yos 4yos 7yos 4yos 7yos

Contrast-absent condition only: mean % (sd)

Relationships between rates of informativeness and performance on standardised

Scoring of the test battery

4-year-olds 7-year-olds t df p Cohen’s d Adults

Proportion of contrast-fixated trials resulting in informative expressions (combined

Proportion of under-informative trials preceded by a contrast fixation (separated by

Overall, as depicted in Figure 6, four-year-olds were equally likely to be

Contrast fixation duration

Summary of eye-movement findings

reduced seven-year-olds’ rates of under-informativeness, and conversely, neglecting to

Appendix: images used in the object recognition task

apple fish sofa/settee

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