Understanding verbal communication: Children's ability to deliberately manipulate ambiguity in referential messages

Abstract

Four- to 7-year-old children's ability to deliberately produce ambiguous messages was studied in a referential communication task. Children's messages under cooperative conditions (i.e., when instructed to inform a partner “so that he knows exactly” the location of a hidden item) were compared with their messages under competitive conditions (i.e., when instructed to inform a partner “so that he cannot know it exactly”). Half of the 4-year-olds, 80% of the 5-year-olds, 85% of the 6-year-olds, and all of the 7-year-olds, gave unambiguous messages on all trials under cooperative conditions. Of these children, 30% of the 4-year-olds, 38% of the 5-year-olds, 59% of the 6-year-olds, and 92% of the 7-year-olds also correctly produced ambiguous messages on all trials under competitive conditions. Full success on the competitive task required the context-dependent choice of descriptive features that the target object had in common with at least one other potential referent. The most frequent mistake in the competitive condition was to merely reduce the number of descriptive features, compared to the cooperative condition, regardless of referential context. The findings are discussed with regard to research on children's understanding of verbal communication as a source of knowledge.