The child's understanding of life-lke communication failures

Abstract
A comparison was made of children's judgements about hilures of communication in two tasks. In one they observed and commented upon the source and reasons for failure where two dolls sent messages to each other about line drawings of men with various attributes. In the other they listened to lifelike stories about misunderstood requests of a person. Judgements about whose fault the failure was and the reasons for it showed agreements of over 75% within each set of materials. There was 60% concordance between materials, implying that the “whose fault” technique with artificial materials is revealing information relevant to the normal development of understanding about communication. Age trends with the judgements about life‐like stories were like those previously found with artificial materials. There was evidence that children were more advanced with the more realistic situations.

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