Description People commonly use indirect requests. The meaning of these indirect requests often h... more Description People commonly use indirect requests. The meaning of these indirect requests often hinges on the linguistic and social context in which they are embedded. For instance, "It's cold in here" may be interpreted as a comment or a request to adjust the heating. Trott and Bergen (2020) showed that when people read a narrative in which the protagonist was unaware of an obstacle (e.g., the car heater was broken) they were more likely to interpret the utterance, "it's cold in here" as a request (e.g., to turn the heater on), than when reading a narrative where the protagonist was aware of an obstacle. This suggests the protagonist's perspective was encoded whilst interpreting the meaning of the utterance. Trott and Bergen (2020) suggest that mentalising may be recruited to interpret the meaning of these ambiguous phrases at two points. Firstly, whilst reading and building a mental model of what the characters perspectives, for instance what they k...
Supplemental material, Appendices for Individual differences in narrative production in late chil... more Supplemental material, Appendices for Individual differences in narrative production in late childhood: Associations with age and fiction reading experience by Lorna G. Hamilton, Isabelle O'Halloran and Nicola Cutting in First Language
Print exposure predicts vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension in middle childhood (C... more Print exposure predicts vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension in middle childhood (Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Mol & Bus, 2011); there is also some evidence that reading for pleasure may scaffold the development of mentalising skills (Boerma, Mol, & Jolles, 2017; Mar, Tackett, & Moore, 2010), although the mechanisms underpinning these associations are yet to be established. Narrative production requires a range of linguistic, discourse organisation, and perspective-taking (mentalising) skills (Norbury & Bishop, 2003). The current study aimed to investigate the predictive role of fiction reading experience in 9- to 12-year-old children’s narrative skills. We report cross-sectional data collected from 125 children (49% males; mean age 10;6) from the north of England. Measures of fiction reading experience, vocabulary, mentalising, and narrative production were administered during a single testing session. A factor score representing fiction reading experience was derived from a...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016
Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in childre... more Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children's success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each other they did not predict innovation success. In Study 2, we measured executive functioning including: inhibition, working memory, attentional flexibility and ill-structured problem-solving. None of these measures predicted innovation, but, innovation was predicted by children's performance on a receptive vocabulary scale that may function as a proxy for general intelligence. We did not find evidence that children's innovation was predicted by specific personal characteristics.
Through eight experiments this thesis investigated the divergence in children’s abilities in the ... more Through eight experiments this thesis investigated the divergence in children’s abilities in the domain of tool making. Despite being excellent tool manufacturers following full instruction, children displayed great difficulty in innovating novel tools to solve problems. Experiments 1 to 3 found four-to-seven- year-olds’ tool-innovation difficulty to be a robust phenomenon that extended to new tasks requiring different tools made by a variety of methods and materials. Experiments 3 and 4 aimed to discover whether some tool-innovation tasks are harder for children than others. Together these experiments suggested that the difficulty of tool innovation is due to the type of transformation required. Experiments 5 to 8 investigated why children find tool innovation so difficult. Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out singular executive functions as limiting factors on children’s performance. Experiments 7 and 8 found that young children have great difficulty in generating and coordinating the co...
Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to sub... more Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children’s cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative language skills. One-hundred-and-twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children told a story from a wordless picture book, and their narratives were coded for syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic features. The grammatical complexity and propositional content of children’s narratives increased with age between 9 and 12 years, while narrative cohesion, coherence and use of mental state terms were stable across the age range. Measures of fiction reading experience were positively correlated with several indices of narrative production quality and predicted unique variance in narrative macrostructure after controlling for individual differences...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016
Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern yo... more Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.
In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an... more In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4-6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children's knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g., shape and color). Participants generalized their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and color. Five- to 6-year-olds (N = 22) almost always transferre...
Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open... more Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the University available in digital form.
Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open... more Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the University available in digital form.
Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate... more Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate tools. Our tool-rich culture may be more reliant on social learning and more limited by domain-general constraints such as ill-structured problem solving than otherwise thought.
Description People commonly use indirect requests. The meaning of these indirect requests often h... more Description People commonly use indirect requests. The meaning of these indirect requests often hinges on the linguistic and social context in which they are embedded. For instance, "It's cold in here" may be interpreted as a comment or a request to adjust the heating. Trott and Bergen (2020) showed that when people read a narrative in which the protagonist was unaware of an obstacle (e.g., the car heater was broken) they were more likely to interpret the utterance, "it's cold in here" as a request (e.g., to turn the heater on), than when reading a narrative where the protagonist was aware of an obstacle. This suggests the protagonist's perspective was encoded whilst interpreting the meaning of the utterance. Trott and Bergen (2020) suggest that mentalising may be recruited to interpret the meaning of these ambiguous phrases at two points. Firstly, whilst reading and building a mental model of what the characters perspectives, for instance what they k...
Supplemental material, Appendices for Individual differences in narrative production in late chil... more Supplemental material, Appendices for Individual differences in narrative production in late childhood: Associations with age and fiction reading experience by Lorna G. Hamilton, Isabelle O'Halloran and Nicola Cutting in First Language
Print exposure predicts vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension in middle childhood (C... more Print exposure predicts vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension in middle childhood (Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Mol & Bus, 2011); there is also some evidence that reading for pleasure may scaffold the development of mentalising skills (Boerma, Mol, & Jolles, 2017; Mar, Tackett, & Moore, 2010), although the mechanisms underpinning these associations are yet to be established. Narrative production requires a range of linguistic, discourse organisation, and perspective-taking (mentalising) skills (Norbury & Bishop, 2003). The current study aimed to investigate the predictive role of fiction reading experience in 9- to 12-year-old children’s narrative skills. We report cross-sectional data collected from 125 children (49% males; mean age 10;6) from the north of England. Measures of fiction reading experience, vocabulary, mentalising, and narrative production were administered during a single testing session. A factor score representing fiction reading experience was derived from a...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016
Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in childre... more Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children's success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each other they did not predict innovation success. In Study 2, we measured executive functioning including: inhibition, working memory, attentional flexibility and ill-structured problem-solving. None of these measures predicted innovation, but, innovation was predicted by children's performance on a receptive vocabulary scale that may function as a proxy for general intelligence. We did not find evidence that children's innovation was predicted by specific personal characteristics.
Through eight experiments this thesis investigated the divergence in children’s abilities in the ... more Through eight experiments this thesis investigated the divergence in children’s abilities in the domain of tool making. Despite being excellent tool manufacturers following full instruction, children displayed great difficulty in innovating novel tools to solve problems. Experiments 1 to 3 found four-to-seven- year-olds’ tool-innovation difficulty to be a robust phenomenon that extended to new tasks requiring different tools made by a variety of methods and materials. Experiments 3 and 4 aimed to discover whether some tool-innovation tasks are harder for children than others. Together these experiments suggested that the difficulty of tool innovation is due to the type of transformation required. Experiments 5 to 8 investigated why children find tool innovation so difficult. Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out singular executive functions as limiting factors on children’s performance. Experiments 7 and 8 found that young children have great difficulty in generating and coordinating the co...
Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to sub... more Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children’s cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative language skills. One-hundred-and-twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children told a story from a wordless picture book, and their narratives were coded for syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic features. The grammatical complexity and propositional content of children’s narratives increased with age between 9 and 12 years, while narrative cohesion, coherence and use of mental state terms were stable across the age range. Measures of fiction reading experience were positively correlated with several indices of narrative production quality and predicted unique variance in narrative macrostructure after controlling for individual differences...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016
Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern yo... more Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.
In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an... more In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4-6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children's knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g., shape and color). Participants generalized their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and color. Five- to 6-year-olds (N = 22) almost always transferre...
Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open... more Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the University available in digital form.
Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open... more Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the University available in digital form.
Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate... more Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate tools. Our tool-rich culture may be more reliant on social learning and more limited by domain-general constraints such as ill-structured problem solving than otherwise thought.
Uploads
Papers by Nicola Cutting