An examination of adapted communication in young children*

In Study 1, children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years were asked to describe one and two object referent sets to one listener who could see the objects and one listener who could not see the objects. The results indicated that all the children gave more information when describing two object referent sets, and that the five- and six-year-olds provided more information (in the form of modifiers) to the listener who could not see the objects than to the listener who could see the objects. In Study 2, children ranging in age from 2 to 4 were asked to describe one object referent set to one listener who could see the objects and one listener who could not, both before and after a questioning session. The questioning session, which was designed to sensitize the children to the range of describable object attributes, clearly led to more informative object descriptions; furthermore, after the questioning session, the three- and four-year-olds manifested a tendency to give more information to the listener who could not see the objects than to the listener who could. The implications of the results of the two studies with regard to the development of adapted communication skills were briefly discussed. Different communicative tasks necessitate different message types, depending upon both the listener’s knowledge and needs and also upon what the speaker wishes to convey (Ford & Olson 1975). Not surprisingly, the capacity for such adapted communication has been found to increase with age (Maratsos 1973, Krauss & Glucksberg 1977). Indeed, in referential communication tasks (which require a speaker to convey information that will discriminate a target referent array from other referent arrays)