Interpreting a speaker’s communicative acts is a challenge children face permanently in everyday life. In doing so, they seem to understand direct communicative acts more easily than indirect communicative acts. The current study investigated which step in the processing of communicative acts might cause difficulties in understanding indirect communication. To assess the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon, we tested 3- and 5-year-old children (N = 105) using eye tracking and an object-choice task. The children watched videos that showed puppets during their everyday activities (e.g., pet care). For every activity, the puppets were asked which of two objects (e.g., rabbit or dog) they would rather have. The puppets responded either directly (e.g., “I want the rabbit”) or indirectly (e.g., “I have a carrot”). Results showed that children chose the object intended by the puppets more often in the direct communication condition than in the indirect communication condition and that 5-year-olds chose correctly more than 3-year-olds. However, even though we found that children’s pupil size increased while hearing the utterances, we found no effect for communication type before children had already decided on the correct object during object selection by looking at it. Only after this point—that is, only in children’s further fixation patterns and reaction times—did differences for communication type occur. Thus, although children’s object-choice performance suggests that indirect communication is harder to understand than direct communication, the cognitive demands during processing of both communication types seem similar. We discuss theoretical implications of these findings for developmental pragmatics in terms of a dual-process account of communication comprehension.

解释说话者的交际行为是儿童在日常生活中永远面临的挑战。在这样做时，他们似乎比间接交流行为更容易理解直接交流行为。目前的研究调查了交际行为处理中的哪个步骤可能会导致理解间接交际的困难。为了评估这种现象的发展轨迹，我们测试了 3 岁和 5 岁的儿童（N = 105) 使用眼动追踪和对象选择任务。孩子们在他们的日常活动（例如，宠物护理）中观看了展示木偶的视频。对于每项活动，木偶都被问到他们更愿意拥有两个物体（例如兔子或狗）中的哪一个。木偶直接（例如，“我想要兔子”）或间接（例如，“我有一个胡萝卜”）做出回应。结果表明，儿童在直接交流条件下比在间接交流条件下更多地选择木偶想要的对象，5岁儿童正确选择的比3岁儿童多。然而，尽管我们发现儿童在听到话语时瞳孔变大，但我们发现在儿童通过观察选择对象时已经决定正确的对象之前，交流类型没有影响。只有在这一点之后——也就是说，只有在儿童的进一步注视模式和反应时间上——才会出现交流类型的差异。因此，尽管儿童的对象选择表现表明间接交流比直接交流更难理解，但两种交流类型在处理过程中的认知需求似乎相似。我们讨论了这些发现对发展语用学的理论意义，这涉及沟通理解的双重过程。