Children's Attributions of Knowledge to the Listener in a Referential Communication Task

Abstract

SODIAN, BEATE. Children's Attributions of Knowledge to the Listener in a Referential Communication Task. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1988, 59, 378-385. 4-6-year-old children's understanding of the effects of ambiguous and informative messages on a listener's knowledge is studied in 2 experiments. Subjects, who are aware of the location of a hidden object, are asked to judge whether another person who received an informative or ambiguous message about the location of the object knows where it is hidden. In the first experiment, it is shown that 6-year-olds distinguish almost perfectly between the effects of informative and ambiguous messages on a listener's knowledge, whereas most 4-year-olds incorrectly judge that the listener knows where the object is hidden when he received an ambiguous message. 4-year-olds are shown to be good on an easier task, where they have to evaluate their own knowledge and the knowledge of a person in their own perspective as listeners in referential communication. In the second experiment, the finding that 6-year-olds are able to assess the effects of message quality on another person's knowledge is replicated, and it is shown that children who receive the knowledge-attribution task perform significantly better than a group of same-aged children who receive an analogous message-evaluation task. These findings are discussed with regard to recent research on children's understanding of the origins of knowledge in human minds.