Development of referential communication: Deciding that a message is uninformative.

Abstract

A listener in a communicative interaction must decide whether or not a speaker's message has been informative. Young children often base their assessments of ambiguous messages on the age of the speaker rather than the actual message perhaps because they lack knowledge of the communicative rule that a message must distinguish referent from nonreferents. This research investigated whether young children typically attend to the age of the speaker when they lack knowledge of other communicative rules. Two experiments compared how children evaluate three types of uninformative messages (ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent) and whether and why the speaker's age affects the evaluation of each. First and fourth graders played a referential communication game with either a peer or an adult speaker. Results indicated that incomplete messages were the easiest to evaluate and inconsistent messages were the most difficult. The evaluation of ambiguous messages was affected by the age of the child and the age of the speaker. Although older children attended solely to the quality of the message, first graders based their evaluations of ambiguous and inconsistent messages on the age of the speaker. Adult speakers' messages were evaluated more positively than peers' because the young children thought the adults were smart and therefore more likely to be good communicators. Discussion focuses on what children need to learn to be effective communicators. A listener in a communicative interaction must decide whether or not a speaker's message has been informative. Although young children typically respond correctly to informative messages, they generally do worse than older children when responding to ambiguous messages, one type of uninformative communication (Patterson & Kister, 1981). These discrepancies in responding to different types of messages may be due to what exactly communication requires of the listener. Whitehurst and Sonnenschein (1985) have hypothesized that communication consists of substantive skills (e.g., factual or conceptual knowledge), enabling skills (e.g., information-processing, vocabulary), and procedural rules (e.g., knowing the communicative rules to follow to be an effective communicator). Each component is important, and deficits in any could hinder performance. Furthermore, the components may be interactive in their effects. According to Whitehurst and Sonnenschein, the various communicative components seem to develop at different rates, with knowledge of the several procedural rules being the last to occur. Thus, for example, not until elementary school do children realize that an informative communication must distinguish referent from nonreferents (Difference rule) or that one must monitor one's comprehension to determine if one has understood what has been said (Comprehension Monitoring rule). Because