STUDIES IN CONVERGENT COMMUNICATION, ul III, COMPARISONS OF CHILD AND ADULT PERFORMANCE

This report, the third of a series of reports dealing with convergent communication among children, compares children's performance on certain communication tasks with that of adults. (Convergent communication is defined as communication in which two perEcns cooperatively exchange information in order to reach an explicitly stated goal and where, because neither person has sufficient information to solve the problem alone, cooperation and a convergence of information is necessary to reach a solution.) The communications of 48 child dyads and 25 adult dyads, which were observed during the performance of three convergent communication tasks were compared on various features of communication structure and content. Compared to child dyads, adult dyads more consistently marked the organization of the communication and included more evidence of verbal cooperation and reclarification cf encoded messages. Children's communications showed more variability in the inclusion of the identified structural features than did adult dyads. No differences in these features were observed in the communication of ch 'ren from different socioeconomic, race, and sex subgroups. (Ruth,.EWB) 01% c'