The Impact of Individual Differences in Social Skills and Executive Control on Visual-Spatial Perspective-Taking in Signers and Nonsigners

Inferring another’s perspective is critical for successful communication and social interaction. Speakers must infer another’s visual perspective in order to reference objects appropriately (e.g., objects on your right may be on my left). When spatial relations are expressed via the visuospatial modality as with sign languages (e.g., American Sign Language, ASL), signers and addressees each have different, conflicting visual perspectives of the signer’s articulators. For example, in face-to-face interactions, a sign produced on the left side is perceived by the addressee on the right side. Therefore, in order to avoid miscommunication, one interlocutor must adopt the other’s visual perspective. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying the perspective-alignment process that is critical for correctly conveying and comprehending spatial descriptions in a signed language. This dissertation examines the relative contributions from inhibitory control, social skills, and mental rotation abilities on the ability to adopt another’s visual-spatial perspective during communication or when performing nonlinguistic perspective-taking tasks. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the literature describing a) the relationships between inhibitory control, social skills, and visual-spatial perspective-taking (VSPT) abilities and b) how experience with a sign language may affect these relationships. Chapter 2 presents a study examining the relative cognitive burdens for producers and comprehenders of manual gestures from non-egocentric perspectives. Comprehending, but not producing, gestures from non-egocentric perspectives was related to inhibitory control abilities. Chapter 3 examines whether deaf ASL-signing adults approached a nonlinguistic VSPT task socially (like hearing English-speaking adults) or whether they utilized nonsocial, perceptual strategies similar to deaf children. Results suggest that deaf signing adults used a nonsocial approach to the VSPT task, possibly due to effects of language modality and/or sociocultural experiences. Chapter 4 examines whether nonlinguistic perspective-taking or mental rotation abilities are related to signers’ comprehension of perspective-dependent structures within ASL (e.g., locative classifier constructions). Correlational analyses indicated that linguistic perspective-taking was related to participants’ overall ASL abilities, nonlinguistic VSPT abilities, and (to a lesser extent) mental rotation abilities. The overall findings are discussed in terms of ramifications for educational and clinical practices as well as for understanding the relationship between spatial cognition and language