Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

Reputational concerns are known to promote cooperation. Individuals regularly act more prosocially when their behavior is observable by others. Here, we investigate 4- and 5-year-old (N = 144) children's reputational strategies in a competitive group setting. The aim of the current study was to explore whether children's sharing behavior is…

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an…

Much research has investigated how children relate to norms taught to them by adult authorities. Very few studies have investigated norms that arise out of children's own peer interactions. In two studies, we investigated how 5- and 7-year-old children teach, enforce, and understand rules that they either created themselves or were taught by an…

Property as a social "agreement" comprises both a communicative component, in which someone makes a claim that she is entitled to some piece of property, and a cooperative component, in which others in the community respect that claim as legitimate. In the current study, preschool children were (a) given the opportunity to mark some…

Human beings have remarkable skills of self-control, but the evolutionary origins of these skills are unknown. Here we compare children at 3 and 6 years of age with one of humans' two nearest relatives, chimpanzees, on a battery of reactivity and self-control tasks. Three-year-old children and chimpanzees were very similar in their abilities to…

Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspective takers but cannot confront different perspectives on the same object (Perner, Stummer,…

To become cooperative members of their cultural groups, developing children must follow their group's social norms. But young children are not just blind norm followers, they are also active norm enforcers, for example, protesting and correcting when someone plays a conventional game the "wrong" way. In two studies, we asked whether young children…

This study investigated young children's commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadically. One child got access to her reward early. For the partner to benefit as well, this child…

Three-year-old children saw an adult displaying the exact same distress in 3 different conditions: (a) the adult's distress was appropriate to a genuine harm, (b) the adult's distress was an overreaction to a minor inconvenience, and (c) there was no apparent cause for the adult's distress. Children who witnessed the adult being appropriately…

Human cooperative communication involves both an informative intention that the recipient understands the content of the signal and also a (Gricean) communicative intention that the recipient recognizes that the speaker has an informative intention. The degree to which children understand this 2-layered nature of communication is the subject of…

We investigated preschoolers' selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts--novel games--from…

When adults make a joint commitment to act together, they feel an obligation to their partner. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether young children also understand joint commitments to act together. In the first study, when an adult orchestrated with the child a joint commitment to play a game together and then broke off from their joint…

We investigated whether infants comprehend others' nonverbal communicative intentions directed to a third person, in an "overhearing" context. An experimenter addressed an assistant and indicated a hidden toy's location by either gazing ostensively or pointing to the location for her. In a matched control condition, the experimenter performed…

Young children use and comprehend different kinds of speech acts from the beginning of their communicative development. But it is not clear how they understand the conventional and normative structure of such speech acts. In particular, imperative speech acts have a world-to-word direction of fit, such that their fulfillment means that the world…