Comprehension Monitoring and the Apprehension of Literal Meaning

Abstract

BONITATIBUS, GARY. Comprehension Monitoring and the Apprehension of Literal Meaning. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1988, 59, 60-70. 2 experiments were done to test the hypothesis that the development of children's comprehension-monitoring skills in the referential communication paradigm is based in part on the ability to differentiate the literal, sentence meaning of a speaker's direction from the meaning or intention that the speaker wished to convey. It was found that children who could monitor their comprehension attended to the literal meaning of the message, whereas their peers who failed to monitor their comprehension did not. Successful monitors preferred knowledge of what was said over what was meant by a speaker to help them diagnose the cause of a failed communication, whereas poor monitors showed no preference. Successful monitors were able to recognize correctly what had been said, whereas poor monitors confused what was said with what was meant, causing them to recognize incorrectly directions that differed from the original but that conveyed the same speaker's intent. The availability of the speaker's possible intentions in the referent array was found to decrease the recognition performance of poor monitors but not successful monitors. Poor monitors, unlike successful monitors, were also willing to accept more than one version of a direction as what had been said, provided that both versions conveyed the same speaker's intent. The results are discussed in terms of the relative linguistic roles of literal versus speaker's meanings.