Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self-description is a routine part of daily life, but choosing what to reveal about ourselves is a cognitively sophisticated communicative act. How do children talk about themselves, and how do they differ from adults? To characterize developmental changes in self-description, we asked 3- to 4-year-old children and adults to share 12 things about themselves. We analyzed over 3,000 self-descriptions using qualitative annotations and sentence embeddings to quantify their semantic structure. Children generated small, idiosyncratic "islands" of self-description, sampling narrowly from a specific topic, whereas adults' responses spanned a broader semantic range, reflecting a more "scripted" approach. While preliminary and descriptive in nature, our work demonstrates how advances in natural language processing can be leveraged to quantify and visualize developmental changes in self-description. The results are consistent with the possibility that self-description evolves from idiosyncratic narratives to a normative social act, raising new questions about the cognitive underpinnings of this development.