Study title

This data collection comprises seven experimental studies that assesses the effects of self-referential cues (e.g., the personal pronoun ‘you’) on children’s learning and processing. There are three experiments focused on numeracy processing in word problems, three experiments looking at literacy processing in close reading tasks, and a final experiment exploring the learning of new information. In the numeracy experiments, we presented 7- to 11-year-old children with arithmetic word problems (e.g., “Eve has 5 apples. Jane has 2 apples more than Eve. How many marbles does Eve have?”), half of which replaced one character name with the self-referent pronoun ‘you’. In the first two experiments, we found that when problems included the self-referent pronoun, they tended to elicit faster and more accurate responses from children. Further, these effects were most pronounced in difficult conditions (e.g., in subtraction rather than addition problems, and when wording is inconsistent rather than consistent with the operation required). We followed up these behavioural experiments with an eye-tracking study, monitoring the length of time that gaze was fixated on specific words within the mathematical word problems. Fixation times showed that children spent significantly less time looking at self-referent pronouns than those referring to another person. This suggests that the effects of self-referent pronouns arise because self-cues facilitate the processing of relevant information, reducing working memory load in problem-solving. In the literacy studies, we tested the effects of self-pronouns on text processing in 9- to 11-year-old children, in the context of close reading tasks. Across three experiments, we trialled different types of passages and questions, different numbers of characters, and different positions of the self-pronoun, as well as presenting questions with the close reading text present or absent onscreen. Findings were mixed, with some initial...