Two Practical Strategies Young Children Use to Interpret Vague Instructions

Abstract

SPEER, JAMES RAMSEY. Two Practical Strategies Young Children Use to Interpret Vague Instructions. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1811-1819. It is proposed that young children employ 2 ordered, nonverbal clarification strategies to interpret vague referential instructions: (1) rely on contextrelative salience of possible referents, or speaker's gestures, as clues to speaker's meaning; and (2) if the first strategy fails, guess, and if the guess goes uncorrected, conclude that it was correct. It is argued that children's use of these strategies accounts in part for a number of previous findings and proposals about children's listening behavior. 2 studies provide evidence supporting children's use of the hypothesized strategies. In the first, kindergartners given vague referential instructions preferred salient to nonsalient referents, were more confident in the correctness of their selection when they chose a salient referent than when they chose a nonsalient referent, and were similarly more confident in conditions where salience cues were present than in one where such cues were absent. These relationships obtained, however, only when the children were told that the speaker was being cooperative; when they were led to believe he was being uncooperative, the foregoing confidence relationships disappeared. In the second study, kindergarten children were more confident of their referential selections when they thought the opportunity for corrective feedback from a cooperative speaker had passed than when they thought such feedback might yet be forthcoming. Results are discussed in terms of the possible origins of the strategies in early nonverbal communication with the caregiver and of possible developmental mechanisms that lead from use of the 2 strategies to adultlike listening behavior.