Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning

Intentional misunderstandings take advantage of the ambiguity of language to do what someone said, instead of what they actually wanted. These purposeful misconstruals or loopholes are a familiar facet of fable, law, and everyday life. Engaging with loopholes requires a nuanced understanding of goals (your own and those of others), ambiguity, and social alignment. As such, loopholes provide a unique window into the normal operations of cooperation and communication. Despite their pervasiveness and utility in social interaction, research on loophole behavior is scarce. Here, we combine a theoretical analysis with empirical data to give a framework of loophole behavior. We first establish that loopholes are widespread, and exploited most often in equal or subordinate relationships (Study 1). We show that people reliably distinguish loophole behavior from both compliance and non-compliance (Study 2), and that people predict that others are most likely to exploit loopholes when their goals are in conflict with their social partner's and there is a cost for non-compliance (Study 3). We discuss these findings in light of other computational frameworks for communication and joint-planning, as well as discuss how loophole behavior might develop and the implications of this work for human-machine alignment.

Learning Loopholes: The Development of Intentional Misunderstandings in Children

What do children do when they do not want to obey but cannot afford to disobey? Might they, like adults, feign misunderstanding and seek out loopholes? Across four studies (N = 723; 44% female; USA; majority White; data collected 2020-2023), we find that loophole behavior emerges around ages 5 to 6 (Study 1, 3-18 years), that children think loopholes will get them into less trouble than non-compliance (Study 2, 4-10 years), predict that other children will be more likely to exploit loopholes when goals conflict (Study 3, 5-10 years), and are increasingly able to generate loopholes themselves (Study 4, 5-10 years). This work provides new insights on how children navigate the gray area between compliance and defiance and the development of loophole behavior across early and middle childhood.

Pragmatics as Social Inference About Intentional Action

Pragmatic inferences are based on assumptions about how speakers communicate: speakers are taken to be cooperative and rational; they consider alternatives and make intentional choices to produce maximally informative utterances. In principle, this analysis applies to linguistic but also non-linguistic communicative actions, but this prediction is typically only tested in children and not in more systematic implicature contexts. We test key implications of this view across six online experiments with American English speaking adults (total N = 231). Experiments 1A and 1B showed that participants made pragmatic inferences based on different types of communicative actions, some being non-linguistic. In Experiment 2, pragmatic inferences were found to be conditional on the speaker's epistemic states. Finally, Experiments 3A to 3C showed that pragmatic inferences were more likely to be made when the communicative action was produced intentionally. Taken together, these results strengthen the view that pragmatics includes social inference about cooperative communication over intentional actions, even non-linguistic actions.

How generic language shapes the development of social thought

Generic language, that is, language that refers to a category as an abstract whole (e.g., 'Girls like pink') rather than specific individuals (e.g., 'This girl likes pink'), is a common means by which children learn about social kinds. Here, we propose that children interpret generics as signaling that their referenced categories are natural, objective, and have distinctive features, and, thus, in the social domain, that such language affects children's beliefs about the social world in ways that extend far beyond the content they explicitly communicate. On this account, even generics expressing uncontentious content (e.g., 'Girls are great at math') can lead children to think of categories as defining fundamentally distinct kinds of people and contribute to the development of stereotypes and other problematic social phenomena.

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

Cognitive Flexibility Moderates the Predictive Effect of Phonological Awareness on Focus Structures in Chinese Preschool Children

Focus structures, a complex aspect of information structure in language, have garnered significant attention in psycholinguistics. The question of whether Chinese preschoolers aged 4-6 years possess the ability to process focus structures in oral communication, and how cognitive factors influence this ability, remains a research focal point. To address this, we recruited 100 Chinese preschoolers aged 4-6 years as participants in our study. This study manipulated the positions of focus particles in sentences to investigate the impact of phonological awareness on young children's comprehension of focus structures. Additionally, we examined the mediating roles of cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control. Our findings indicate the following: (1) phonological awareness positively predicted the accuracy of focus structural processing; (2) inhibitory control did not significantly predict the accuracy of focus structural processing; and (3) cognitive flexibility partially mediated the relationship between phonological awareness and focus structural comprehension. These results confirmed the predictive effect of cognitive flexibility on children's comprehension of focus structures. Moreover, they demonstrate that young children's phonological awareness can predict their focus structure comprehension ability through the mediating role of cognitive flexibility. This suggests that children's cognitive flexibility can aid in understanding sentences with focus structures.

No evidence for adult smartphone use affecting attribution of communicative intention in toddlers: Online imitation study using the Sock Ball Task

Adults infer others' communicative intentions, or lack thereof, from various types of information. Young children may be initially limited to attributions based on a small set of ostensive signals. It is unknown when richer pragmatic inferences about communicative intentions emerge in development. We sought novel type of evidence for such inferences in 17-to-19-month-olds. We hypothesized that toddlers recognize adults' smartphone use in face-to-face interactions as incongruous with ostension and would rely on this interpretation when inferring the communicative intention of a model in a new imitation task conducted entirely online, dubbed the Sock Ball Task. In Experiment 1 with a between-subject design, we tested the hypothesis by assessing toddlers' (N = 48) imitation of sub-efficient means and the goal-outcome presented by a model, who interrupted her ostensive demonstration either by using a smartphone or by fiddling with her wristwatch, depending on the condition. We expected toddlers to imitate the sub-efficient means more faithfully in the wristwatch condition than in the smartphone condition. But there was no significant effect of condition on imitation of neither means nor goal. Thus, our hypothesis was not borne out by the results. In Experiment 2, using a within-subject design, we first assessed toddlers' (N = 24) performance in a no-demonstration baseline and then again after a no-disruption ostensive demonstration. In all three conditions with ostensive demonstration (Experiment 1: smartphone, wristwatch; Experiment 2: no-disruption), toddlers produced the demonstrated sub-efficient means significantly above the baseline level. In the no-disruption condition, goals were also imitated significantly above the baseline level. We conclude that the Sock Ball Task is a valid research tool for studying toddler imitation of novel means actions with objects. We end by discussing suggestions for improving the task in future studies.

Using contrastive inferences to learn about new words and categories

In the face of unfamiliar language or objects, description is one cue people can use to learn about both. Beyond narrowing potential referents to those that match a descriptor (e.g., "tall"), people could infer that a described object is one that contrasts with other relevant objects of the same type (e.g., "the tall cup" contrasts with another, shorter cup). This contrast may be in relation to other objects present in the environment (this cup is tall among present cups) or to the referent's category (this cup is tall for a cup in general). In three experiments, we investigate whether people use such contrastive inferences from description to learn new word-referent mappings and learn about new categories' feature distributions. People use contrastive inferences to guide their referent choice, though size - and not color - adjectives prompt them to consistently choose the contrastive target over alternatives (Experiment 1). People also use color and size description to infer that a novel object is atypical of its category (Experiments 2 and 3): utterances like "the blue toma" prompt people to infer that tomas are less likely to be blue in general. However, these two inferences do not trade off substantially: people infer a described referent is atypical even when the descriptor was necessary to establish reference. We model these experiments in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework and find that it predicts both of these inferences. Overall, people are able to use contrastive inferences from description to resolve reference and make inferences about a novel object's category, letting them learn more about new things than literal meaning alone allows.

More than one path to pragmatics? Insights from children's grasp of implicit, figurative and ironical meaning

Human communication requires impressive inferential abilities and mind-reading skills. To learn how to speak and become competent communicators children need both. The development of pragmatic abilities presents us with a puzzle. On the one hand, much evidence suggests pragmatics play a grounding role in early communication and language acquisition. On the other, preschoolers find linguistic pragmatic inferences such as implicatures, metaphor and irony difficult to grasp. Apperly and Butterfill (2009) maintain that there are two separate systems for belief reasoning: a simpler one and a more sophisticated one that develops later. Along this line of reasoning we might also expect there to be two separate kinds of pragmatic abilities: an early set using (among other things) the simpler Theory of Mind system, and a more sophisticated one appearing later in childhood and using full-blown Theory of Mind. I will argue there is no need to divide pragmatic abilities in such a way to bridge the gap between the pragmatic inferential skills found in toddlers and the difficulties observed in preschoolers. Evidence from the past two decades indicates that phenomena such as implicatures and metaphor (but not irony) can be understood earlier than previously established. Additionally, children's apparent struggle with specific pragmatic inferences might be better explained by factors independent from pragmatic competence, but which interact with it.

An individual differences perspective on pragmatic abilities in the preschool years

Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three- to 5-year-old German-speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Individual differences in pragmatic abilities are important to understanding variation in language development. Research in this domain lacks a precise theoretical framework and psychometrically high-quality measures. We present six tasks capturing a wide range of pragmatic abilities with excellent re-test reliability. We use a computational cognitive model to provide a substantive theory of individual differences in pragmatic abilities.

The neurobiological map of theory of mind and pragmatic communication in autism

Children with autism often have difficulty with Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer mental states, and pragmatic skills, the contextual use of language. Neuroimaging research suggests ToM and pragmatic skills overlap, as the ability to understand another's mental state is a prerequisite to interpersonal communication. To our knowledge, no study in the last decade has examined this overlap further. To assess the emerging consensus across neuroimaging studies of ToM and pragmatic skills in autism, we used coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis of 35 functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies (13 pragmatic skills, 22 ToM), resulting in a meta-analysis of 1,295 participants (647 autistic, 648 non-autistic) aged 7 to 49 years. Group difference analysis revealed decreased left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) activation in autistic participants during pragmatic skills tasks. For ToM tasks, we found reduced anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) activation in autistic participants. Collectively, both ToM and pragmatic tasks showed activation in IFG and superior temporal gyrus (STG) and a reduction in left hemispheric activation in autistic participants. Overall, the findings underscore the cognitive and neural processing similarities between ToM and pragmatic skills, and their underlying neurobiological differences in autism.

Modeling Individual Differences in Children's Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning

Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children - on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level. We address this question in children (N = 60, 3- to 5-year-olds), taking advantage of recent work on pragmatic cue integration. In Part 1, we use data from four independent tasks to estimate child-specific sensitivity parameters to three information sources: semantic knowledge, expectations about speaker informativeness, and sensitivity to common ground. In Part 2, we use these parameters to generate participant-specific trial-by-trial predictions for a new task that jointly manipulated all three information sources. The model accurately predicted children's behavior in the majority of trials. This work advances a substantive theory of individual differences in which the primary locus of developmental variation is sensitivity to individual information sources.

A New Look at Young Children's Referential Informativeness

In this article, I review experimental evidence for the dependence of 2- to 5-year-olds' linguistic referential informativeness on cues to common ground (CG) and propose a process model. Cues to CG provide evidence for CG, that is, for the shared knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes of interlocutors. The presence of cues to CG (e.g., unimpeded listener line of regard or prior mention) is shown to be associated with less informative reference (e.g., pronouns). In contrast, the absence of cues to CG (e.g., impeded listener line of regard or new mention) is shown to be associated with more informative reference (e.g., nouns). Informativeness is sensitive to linguistic before nonlinguistic cues to CG (i.e., 2.0 vs. 2.5 years old, respectively). Reference is cast as a process of active inference, a formulation of Bayesian belief-guided control in biological systems. Child speakers are hierarchical generative models that, characteristically, expect sensory evidence for the evolved, prior Bayesian belief that interlocutor mental states are aligned (i.e., that CG exists). Referential control emerges as an embodied tool to gather evidence for this prior belief. Bottom-up cues to CG elicited by action drive updates to beliefs about CG. In turn, beliefs about CG guide efficient referential control.

Discourse with Few Words: Coherence Statistics, Parent-Infant Actions on Objects, and Object Names

The data for early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the nonlinguistic events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month -old infants were left alone in a room for 10 minutes with 32 objects available for exploration. Parent and infant handling of objects and parent naming of objects were coded. The four measured statistics were from measures used in the study of coherent discourse: (1) a frequency distribution in which actions were frequently directed to a few objects and more rarely to other objects; (2) repeated returns to the high-frequency objects over the 10-minute play period; (3) clustered repetitions, continuity, of actions on objects; and (4) structured networks of transitions among objects in play that connected all the played-with objects. Parent naming was infrequent but related to the statistics of object-directed actions. The implications of the discourse-like stream of actions are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that could support rapid learning of object names from relatively few name-object co-occurrences.

Good-enough language production

Our ability to comprehend and produce language is one of humans' most impressive skills, but it is not flawless. We must convey and interpret messages via a noisy channel in ever-changing contexts and we sometimes fail to access an optimal combination of words and grammatical constructions. Here, we extend the notion of good-enough (GN) comprehension to GN production, which allows us to unify a wide range of phenomena including overly vague word choices, agreement errors, resumptive pronouns, transfer effects, and children's overextensions and regularizations. We suggest these all involve the accessing and production of a 'GN' option when a more-optimal option is inaccessible. The role of accessibility highlights the need to relate memory encoding and retrieval processes to language comprehension and production.

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication

Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species' social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use, but also novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment, and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society, and culture.

Mutual Exclusivity in Pragmatic Agents

One of the great challenges in word learning is that words are typically uttered in a context with many potential referents. Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents, which is taken to reflect a mutual exclusivity (ME) bias, forms a useful disambiguation mechanism. We study semantic learning in pragmatic agents-combining the Rational Speech Act model with gradient-based learning-and explore the conditions under which such agents show an ME bias. This approach provides a framework for investigating a pragmatic account of the ME bias in humans but also for building artificial agents that display an ME bias. A series of analyses demonstrates striking parallels between our model and human word learning regarding several aspects relevant to the ME bias phenomenon: online inference, long-term learning, and developmental effects. By testing different implementations, we find that two components, pragmatic online inference and incremental collection of evidence for one-to-one correspondences between words and referents, play an important role in modeling the developmental trajectory of the ME bias. Finally, we outline an extension of our model to a deep neural network architecture that can process more naturalistic visual and linguistic input. Until now, in contrast to children, deep neural networks have needed indirect access to (supposed to be novel) test inputs during training to display an ME bias. Our model is the first one to do so without using this manipulation.

Learning Communicative Acts in Children's Conversations: A Hidden Topic Markov Model Analysis of the CHILDES Corpora

Over their first years of life, children learn not just the words of their native languages, but how to use them to communicate. Because manual annotation of communicative intent does not scale to large corpora, our understanding of communicative act development is limited to case studies of a few children at a few time points. We present an approach to automatic identification of communicative acts using a hidden topic Markov model, applying it to the conversations of English-learning children in the CHILDES database. We first describe qualitative changes in parent-child communication over development, and then use our method to demonstrate two large-scale features of communicative development: (a) children develop a parent-like repertoire of our model's communicative acts rapidly, their learning rate peaking around 14 months of age, and (b) this period of steep repertoire change coincides with the highest predictability between parents' acts and children's, suggesting that structured interactions play a role in learning to communicate.

How children learn to communicate discriminatively

How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discriminative approach embodied in psychological and computational models of learning, and formally described by communication theory. It describes how discriminative learning theory offers an alternative perspective on the way that systems of semantic cues are conditioned onto communicative codes, while information theory provides a very different view of the nature of the codes themselves. It shows how the distributional properties of languages satisfy the communicative requirements described in information theory, enabling language learners to align their expectations despite the vastly different levels of experience among language users, and to master communication systems far more abstract than linguistic intuitions traditionally assume. Topics reviewed include morphological development, the acquisition of verb argument structures, and the functions of linguistic systems that have proven to be stumbling blocks for compositional theories: grammatical gender and personal names.

Situating Language in the Real-World: The Role of Multimodal Iconicity and Indexicality

In the last decade, a growing body of work has convincingly demonstrated that languages embed a certain degree of non-arbitrariness (mostly in the form of iconicity, namely the presence of imagistic links between linguistic form and meaning). Most of this previous work has been limited to assessing the degree (and role) of non-arbitrariness in the speech (for spoken languages) or manual components of signs (for sign languages). When approached in this way, non-arbitrariness is acknowledged but still considered to have little presence and purpose, showing a diachronic movement towards more arbitrary forms. However, this perspective is limited as it does not take into account the situated nature of language use in face-to-face interactions, where language comprises categorical components of speech and signs, but also multimodal cues such as prosody, gestures, eye gaze etc. We review work concerning the role of context-dependent iconic and indexical cues in language acquisition and processing to demonstrate the pervasiveness of non-arbitrary multimodal cues in language use and we discuss their function. We then move to argue that the online omnipresence of multimodal non-arbitrary cues supports children and adults in dynamically developing situational models.

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-5-year-old children's word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.

Dichotomous thinking about social groups: Learning about one group can activate opposite beliefs about another group

Across three studies (N = 607), we examined people's use of a dichotomizing heuristic-the inference that characteristics belonging to one group do not apply to another group-when making judgments about novel social groups. Participants learned information about one group (e.g., "Zuttles like apples"), and then made inferences about another group (e.g., "Do Twiggums like apples or hate apples?"). Study 1 acted as a proof of concept: Eight-year-olds and adults (but not 5-year-olds) assumed that the two groups would have opposite characteristics. Learning about the group as a generic whole versus as specific individuals boosted the use of the heuristic. Study 2 and Study 3 (sample sizes, methods, and analyses pre-registered), examined whether the presence or absence of several factors affected the activation and scope of the dichotomizing heuristic in adults. Whereas learning about or treating the groups as separate was necessary for activating dichotomous thinking, intergroup conflict and featuring only two (versus many) groups was not required. Moreover, the heuristic occurred when participants made both binary and scaled decisions. Once triggered, adults applied this cognitive shortcut widely-not only to benign (e.g., liking apples) and novel characteristics (e.g., liking modies), but also to evaluative traits signaling the morals or virtues of a social group (e.g., meanness or intelligence). Adults did not, however, extend the heuristic to the edges of improbability: They failed to dichotomize when doing so would attribute highly unusual preferences (e.g., disliking having fun). Taken together, these studies indicate the presence of a dichotomizing heuristic with broad implications for how people make social group inferences.

Preschool-Aged Children Jointly Consider Others' Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

Emotional expressions are abundant in children's lives. What role do they play in children's causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others' emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0-4.9; N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy and then saw an adult play with it. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy's salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children consider others' knowledge and selectively interpret others' surprise as vicarious prediction error to guide their own exploration.

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

In conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history (common ground). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2- to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. In a tablet-based game, children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun "it" as referring to another member of the same category. In Study 2, only 4-year-olds interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between ages 2 and 5.

Young children's developing ability to integrate gestural and emotional cues

In three studies, children aged 22 to 46 months (N = 180) needed to integrate pointing gestures or gaze cues with positive and negative facial expressions to succeed in an object-choice task. Finding a toy required children to either choose (positive expression) or avoid (negative expression) the indicated target. Study 1 showed that 22-month-olds are better at integrating a positive facial expression with a pointing gesture compared with a negative facial expression with a pointing gesture. Study 2 tracked the integration of negative expressions and pointing across development, finding an unexpected, U-shaped trajectory with group-level success only at 46 months. Study 3 showed that already 34-month-olds succeeded when pointing was replaced with communicative gaze. These findings suggest that at the end of the second year of life, children are generally able to integrate emotional displays and communicative cues such as gestures and ostensive gaze to reevaluate and contextualize utterances. In addition, pointing gestures appear to be understood by young children as a call to act on a referenced object. Findings illustrate that communicative cues should be studied in conjunction with emotional displays to draw an ecologically valid picture of communicative development.