Unambiguous Message Research Articles

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

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.

Children's Appraisal of Different Sources of Referential Communicative Inadequacies

LEMPERS, JACQUES D., and ELROD, MIMI MILNER. Children's Appraisal of Different Sources of Referential Communicative Inadequacies. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 509-515. Nursery school children and kindergartners served as listeners in 5 types of communicative conditions: ( 1) adequate condition-the child received a referentially unambiguous message; (2) message-dependent inadequate condition-the child received a referentially ambiguous message; (3) situation-dependent inadequate condition-the child received a referentially nonfunctional message; (4) listener-dependent inadequate condition-the child received an incomprehensible, referentially unambiguous message; and (5) speaker-dependent inadequate condition-the child received an interrupted, meaningless message. All subjects performed correctly in the adequate condition by pointing to the specified object. In the 4 inadequate conditions, the children were probed for their explanations of not responding or incorrect responding. A 3-level scoring system to classify their responses was used: Level 2-awareness of the nature of the problem; Level 1-awareness of the existence of a problem; Level 0-no awareness. A 2 (age) x 2 (sex) X 4 (inadequate condition) ANOVA with repeated measures showed highly significant main effects for age and condition and a significant sex X condition interaction effect. The results indicate that young children's appraisal skills as listener in referential communications depend, among other things, on the specific source of the inadequacy present.

Mechanism for RNA splicing of gene transcripts

It has been demonstrated that structural genes in eukaryotes contain intervening sequences (introns) which are absent from expressed sequences (exons) [l-6]. There is evidence that intervening sequences are transcribed [7], but subsequently the introns are removed by a process which is now known as RNA splicing [ 8,9]. RNA splicing must be a very precise process since it results in the joining of successive coding sequences to produce an unambiguous message. We wish to propose a mechanism for RNA splicing which depends on intermolecular hybridisation and which is closely analogous to the genetic recombination of DNA molecules. In both processes the point at which the breakage and reunion of polynucleotide genes occurs is determined by the base pairing of complementary sequences (hybrid DNA or hybrid RNA). In this way the addition of extraneous nucleotides or the deletion of essential nucleotides is prevented.

Children's Comprehension of Referential Communication: Decoding Ambiguous Messages

BEARISON, DAVID J., and LEVEY, LINDA M. Children's Comprehension of Referential Communication: Decoding Ambiguous Messages. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 716-720. The present study assessed children's (kindergarten, second, and fourth graders) ability to decode ambiguous and unambiguous verbal messages using standardized procedures. In ambiguous messages, questions were posed using pronouns without indicating their referents. Dependent measures consisted of children's judgments of the quality of the messages and their response latencies. Findings indicated that the ability to distinguish between ambiguous and unambiguous messages increased with age and that response latencies reflected levels of decoding ability.