Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

All languages have demonstratives—grammatical words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ in English, which are a universal tool to establish joint attention on a referent. Demonstratives are acquired early, but their mature use has a protracted development, with recent studies showing that 10- and 11-year-old children do not yet use demonstratives like adults do. Here we investigated demonstrative use by teenagers (ages 12-17) and adults with a focus on two social parameters affecting demonstrative choice in Spanish: Listener Position and Listener Attention. The results of two experiments using an online demonstrative-choice task revealed that teenagers use Spanish demonstratives comparably to adults in most conditions. However, teenagers seem to still be adjusting the relative weight of the social parameters affecting demonstrative choice in Spanish, supporting the view that acquiring and regularly using demonstratives trains social cognition through communicative interaction.