Children's Referential Communication Research Articles

Interactive contexts increase informativeness in children's referential communication.

Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of almost identical events to a passive confederate listener who could either see or not see the referents. Adults provided disambiguating information that picked out the target event but children massively failed to do so (even though 5-year-olds were more informative than 4-year-olds). Furthermore, both children and adults were more likely to mention atypical than typical disambiguating event components. Because of the contrastive nature of the task, the listener's visual access had no effects on production. Experiment 2 was a more interactive version of Experiment 1 where participants played a guessing game with a "naïve" listener. In this context, children (and adults) became overall more informative, and the difference between child groups disappeared. We conclude that the informativeness of children's event descriptions is heavily context-dependent and is boosted when children engage in a collaborative interaction with a "true" interlocutor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Do You Know What I Know? The Impact of Participant Role in Children's Referential Communication.

For successful language use, interlocutors must be able to accurately assess their shared knowledge (“common ground”). Such knowledge can be accumulated through linguistic and non-linguistic context, but the same context can be associated with different patterns of knowledge, depending on the interlocutor's participant role (Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark, 1992). Although there is substantial evidence that children's ability to model partners' knowledge develops gradually, most such evidence focuses on non-linguistic context. We investigated the extent to which 8- to 10-year-old children can assess common ground developed through prior linguistic context, and whether this is sensitive to variations in participant role. Children repeatedly described tangram figures to another child, and then described the same figures to a third child who had been a side-participant, an overhearer, or absent during the initial conversation. Children showed evidence of partner modeling, producing shorter referential expressions with repeated mention to the same partner. Moreover, they demonstrated sensitivity to differences in common ground with the third child based on participant role on some but not all measures (e.g., description length, but not definiteness). Our results suggest that by ten, children make distinctions about common ground accumulated through prior linguistic context but do not yet consistently deploy this knowledge in an adult-like way.

Incentives improve the clarity of school-age children's referential statements

Preschoolers (n=40) and school-aged children (n=39) participated in a referential communication task in which they described images for a listener. Of interest was whether children would provide clearer descriptions in a highly motivating context, in which they could take home target ‘stickers’ that they described correctly, relative to a less-motivating context in which they simply described target ‘pictures’. School-aged children, but not preschoolers, provided more informative descriptors in the incentive condition. An order effect emerged such that school-aged children who were first offered incentives maintained a high level of performance in the subsequent condition without incentives, whereas school-aged children who first participated in the condition without incentives demonstrated improved performance when subsequently promised incentives. Children's use of inefficient strategies, such as providing redundant descriptors and pointing to the images, was not affected by incentives. Findings demonstrate the impact of subtle methodological differences when examining children's referential communication and highlight the effect of motivational factors on children's communicative performance.

Private meaning and comparison process in children's referential communication

This research expands on the study by Asher and Oden(1976), and contests some of the latter's results. Sixty-four subjects (32 from third grade and 32 from fifth), subsequently classified as good and poor communicators, emitted one-word messages to an imaginary listener for 30 similar word pairs in which the referent was underlined. Half of these children 's emissions were later presented to the 64 encoders themselves and to 64 adults, who tried to identify referents. Findings revealed two explanations of children 's failure to communicate referentially with others: poor communicators neglect comparing the associative strength of potential messages to the referent and nonreferent; the fact that both poor and good communicators emit social messages of private but not public meaning (addressed, but not adapted in meaning, to the decoder). The second conclusion contradicted Asher and Oden 's results. Finally, a four-week delay between encoder and decoder roles was recommended.

Locating objects and communicating about locations: Organizational differences in children's searching and direction-giving.

Two studies examined spatial organization reflected in searches for objects and descriptions of locations. Six-year-olds and adults retrieved objects hidden on the floors of a house or directed another person about how to retrieve them. Of particular interest was whether children's searches and directions reflected clustering of locations by floors. Six-year-olds' searches were more organized than their directions, but a follow-up study demonstrated that they could produce organized directions if prompted. Analyses of the content and structure of spatial information in directions indicated that children and adults communicated the information in an order of decreasing size of spatial unit. Results are discussed in terms of factors underlying spatially organized searching and directiongiving. Locating objects and places is a practical task that occupies a great deal of everyday human and animal behavior. A major concern of infants and young children, for example, is finding and maintaining proximity to their primary caregiver (Carr, Dabbs, & Carr, 1975). Adults also spend a considerable amount of time searching for valued items such as car keys, checkbooks, and papers containing important pieces of information. Likewise, children and adults frequently are confronted with requests from others to tell them the whereabouts of missing objects. A daily routine in many households, for example, is getting children to describe where they put their shoes or the last place they remember seeing their homework. Clearly, children's skill in searching for missing objects and describing their whereabouts has important practical consequences. Understanding these skills also has theoretical implications for understanding the development of children's referential communication skills and how spatial information is extracted from the surrounding environment and from memory. Children as young as 4 years are capable of spatially organized searches in situations in which there are relatively few locations that are subdivided into a small number of spatial clusters. For example, Wellman, Somerville, Revelle, Haake, and Sophian (1984) found that 4- and 5-year-olds minimized the number of traverses they made between two clusters of loca

Using a barrier game format to improve children's referential communication skills.

The effectiveness of training referential communication skills with learning-disabled (LD) students was investigated. Forty-two upper elementary-aged children were divided equally into three groups: (a) an LD training group, (b) an LD control group, and (c) a normally achieving training group. The normal group was included as a check on training procedures. All subjects were administered pretests. The measures were a listening task and two speaking tasks. The two training groups were trained in dyads on a referential communication task. Posttests were administered 1 week after training. Results indicated that on the listening task the groups were not significantly different. On both speaking measures, the LD trained group achieved significantly higher scores than did the LD control group. The LD and normally achieving training groups were not significantly different. Follow-up testing 7 months later indicated that significant differences remained between the two LD groups on one of the speaking measures. It is concluded that LD students can benefit from training on referential communication tasks.

The Effects of two Feedback Types on Normal and Language Impaired Children's Referential Communication

Four groups of children participated in a referential communication task to assess the effects of listener feedback on the number of critical and redundant attributes coded by normal and language impaired children. Results indicated that five year old children and subsequent age groups are skilled at analysing and coding three critical attributes, and that critical attribute feedback consistently resulted in fewer redundant attributes.

Process training to improve children's referential communication: Asher and Wigfield (1981) revisited.

Process training to improve children's referential communication: Asher and Wigfield (1981) revisited.

Process training to improve children's referential communication: Asher and Wigfield (1981) revisited.

Process training to improve children's referential communication: Asher and Wigfield (1981) revisited.

Effects of two types of familiarity on children's referential communication abilities

Stimulus familiarity has been shown to facilitate children's performance on referential communication tasks. The facilitative effects of stimulus familiarity could result either from prior stimulus recognizability or from immediate experience with experimental stimuli. The present study separated the effects of stimulus recognizability and experience. Kindergarten and third grade children communicated about both familiar and novel stimuli. Half the children were exposed to both types of stimuli prior to participation. The results indicated that older children chose the correct referent more often than younger children; children who received experience performed better than children who did not, and familiar stimuli were described more accurately than novel stimuli. The effects of stimulus recognizability and experience were independent. Third‐grade listeners were more likely to ask for additional information than kindergarten listeners, and third‐grade speakers tended to respond to such requests more often by providing new information. Results were discussed in terms of the independence of stimulus recognizability and experimental experience.

How feedback from a listener affects children's referential communication skills.

How feedback from a listener affects children's referential communication skills.

How feedback from a listener affects children's referential communication skills.

How feedback from a listener affects children's referential communication skills.

Planning and the development of communication skills

A review of the literature on children's referential communication ability suggests how these studies help us understand children's planning in their social interactions with others.

Influence of comparison training on children's referential communication.

Influence of comparison training on children's referential communication.

Influence of comparison training on children's referential communication.

Influence of comparison training on children's referential communication.

Children's referential communication: Components of plans for effective listening.

Children's referential communication: Components of plans for effective listening.

Children's referential communication: Components of plans for effective listening.

Children's referential communication: Components of plans for effective listening.

The Effects of Age, Sex, and Listener Feedback on Grade School Children's Referential Communication

KARABENICK, JULIE D., and MILLER, SCOTT A. The Effects ofAge, Sex, and Listener Feedback on Grade School Children's Referential Communication. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 678-683. The development of speaker and listener skills in a referential-communication task was examined among 144 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children. Of special interest were the listener's ability to provide feedback and the speaker's ability to improve his messages in response to feedback. 2 conditions were employed. In 1 condition, the speaker and listener could not see each other but could communicate freely back and forth; in the second, the speaker and listener could not see each other, and only the speaker could talk. Children alternated between speaker and listener roles, and feedback followed each trial. 5-year-old speakers conveyed significantly less information than did 6and 7-year-olds. Male and female speakers communicated similar amounts of information in the no-feedback condition; however, only boys generated superior messages with listener feedback. As listeners, boys were more active than girls, asking more questions and confirming more speaker messages. At all ages, both male and female listeners were able to carry out most of the adequately encoded messages. They were less successful, however, in providing helpful feedback via questions and confirmations.

The Effects of Age, Sex, and Listener Feedback on Grade School Children's Referential Communication

The Effects of Age, Sex, and Listener Feedback on Grade School Children's Referential Communication