Individual differences in speakers’ perspective taking: The roles of executive control and working memory

Liane Wardlow

Both speaking and listening require taking into account the perspective of one's communicative partner. Is perspective taking a domain-specific process internal to the language production and comprehension systems? Or is it a domain-general process regulated by the same mechanisms that are used to regulate other forms of behavior? Past research has shown that listeners' perspective taking is at least partially regulated by inhibitory control and working memory (WM), suggesting that it may be best thought of in domain-general terms. The present experiment was designed to explore individual differences in nonlinguistic executive functioning in order to assess whether domain-general mechanisms help regulate speakers' perspective-taking behavior. A group of 60 speakers participated in a referential communication task and in tasks measuring WM and executive control (EC). The results revealed that WM and EC were both predictive of the speakers' perspective taking, suggesting that perspective taking may be regulated by domain-general mechanisms.