Who's going where?: Children's route descriptions for peers and younger children

Abstract

Previous research has shown that 8‐year‐olds are quite sensitive to the needs of a listener when giving spatial directions. Particularly for younger listeners, they produce a more linear description (i.e. they include an extensive number of informative propositions, connected in an appropriate order by ‘then’ connectives). By contrast, 5‐year‐olds fail to make adjustments for a younger listener.The present experiment examined possible reasons for this insensitivity on the part of younger speakers. Children aged 5 to 8 years were asked to describe a route after they had been given one of three prompts: a general prompt which asked for clarity but gave no other clues; an age‐specific prompt in which the age of the listener was underlined; and a task‐specific prompt in which some of the characteristics of the more helpful linear route description were mentioned. The results indicated that even with the vague general prompt, 8‐year‐olds made adjustments for younger listeners. The 5‐year‐olds only adjusted their message following the task‐specific prompt, whereas both the task‐specific and the less explicit age‐specific prompt led to adjustments by the 6‐year‐olds. The implications of these results for the development of route description skills are discussed.