Teaching Children about Verbal Referential Communication

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Abstract
The results of both experimental and naturalistic studies show that when young children are told explicitly whether the listener does or does not understand what the speaker means, they advance both in their understanding about message ambiguity and in their communicative performance. We report an investigation of how this explicit information achieves its effects. In a comparison of five forms of intervention we found that when the explicit information was given immediately after the message, as in normal conversation, it was much more effective than when it was given at the end of an exchange. Under the former condition certain listening or speaking behaviours were imposed by the giving of the information. If this same behaviour was imposed without any explicit information, the effects on post-test performance were almost as great. We interpret the results as suggesting that explicit information about listeners' understanding or nonunderstanding achieves its effects via changes in children's listening and/or speaking behaviour. We discuss how this might happen.