Developmental changes in the child's explanations of communication failure

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The “whose fault” technique involves asking the child to account for communication failure and to allocate blame to the speaker or the listener (or both). In the first experiment the age groups tested were 6 years, 7 years, 8 years and 10 to 11 years. Allocations of blame changed very significantly with increasing age (p < −00001) from predominantly listener blaming to total speaker blaming. There was a decrease from 92% to 0% in blaming the listener and judging the message adequate both when the child was in the role of listener and that of speaker. There was an increase from 0% to 100% in blaming the speaker and judging his message inadequate regardless of the role being played by the child. It appears that the younger children, unlike the older, did not understand that communication failure may be caused by an inadequate message. A tendency for speaker‐ rather than listener‐blaming to be more likely to occur when the child was listener rather than when he was speaker was exaggerated into significance (p = −02) in the second experiment which, unlike the first, was designed to investigate this. It is argued from this result that Piaget's emphasis upon the importance of practice in the speaking role for the breaking down of egocentrism is misplaced.