Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults routinely tailor their communication to others' auditory access, such as substituting gestures for speech in noisy environments. Yet, assessing the effectiveness of different communicative acts given others' perceptual access—especially when it differs from one's own—requires mental-state reasoning, which undergoes significant developmental change. Can young children tailor their communication to others' auditory access? In Study 1, parental report (n=98) indicated that most children, by age 4, adjust their communicative behaviors in noisy settings. Study 2 elicited these behaviors experimentally with 4- to 5-year-olds (n=68). Children taught how a novel toy works to a learner who wore headphones playing either loud music or nothing. Children were more likely to use physical demonstrations, and less likely to use verbal explanations, when the learner's auditory access was obstructed. These findings illustrate how mental-state reasoning might support children's ability to communicate successfully across perceptually-compromised contexts and individuals.