Linguistic Effects on Children's Encoding and Decoding Performance in Japan, the United States, and England

Abstract

FOORMAN, BARBARA R., and KINOSHITA, YOSHIKO. Linguistic Effects on Children's Encoding and Decoding Performance in Japan, the United States, and England. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 69-77. Within a referential communication task that required both the production of attribute description that uniquely identified 1 wooden animal from an array of wooden animals and comparable correct selections through comprehension of such descriptions, we compared the effect of linguistic structure on encoding and decoding performance of 120 5and 7-year-old children from Japan, the United States, and England. The linguistic structure was the encoding and decoding of attributes of size, color, pattern, and shape. In English such coordination can be accomplished through prenominal adjective ordering rules (e.g., a little brown spotted dog). In Japanese the ordering of these attributes is quite flexible. Subjects performed similarly on tests of short-term memory and perceptual matching. However, Japanese children produced more informative messages than American children after feedback, as well as comprehended more of their own encodings and adult encodings. Not until age 7 were the American children able to comprehend adults' descriptions. These procedures were replicated with British children and the decoding task was expanded with scrambled orders of attributes. Results suggest that differences in adjectival ordering rules as well as stylistic variation affect encoding and decoding accuracy.