This study examined how contradictory verbal-facial communications are understood and resolved at different ages. Preschoolers, grade school children, and adults were asked to interpret videotapes in which an actor conveyed contradictory verbal and facial expressions with and without a story context that provided a reason for the contradiction. Results showed both age and context effects: Whereas younger children were more likely to focus on the literal contents of the verbal or facial components, older subjects were more likely to relate each of the two components to an overall communicative intent. In addition, messages presented within a meaningful context were resolved in a more sophisticated manner than those presented in isolation, although younger children were limited in the extent to which they were helped by the context cues. The results are discussed in terms of the development of understanding message-referent relations.In the course of everyday face-to-face interaction, communication takes place by means of several modalities or channels. Although usually redundant and complementary in their conveyed meanings, verbal, intonational, and gestural components may sometimes appear independent or even contradictory. Nonetheless, adults can easily synthesize discrepant message components into a higher order interpretation; for example, a disgusted face coupled with the statement "things are going great" is readily interpreted as sarcasm (Friedman, 1979). Similar processes of synthesizing an interpretation from discrepant components can be used to explain inferences of ambivalence, insincerity, deception, or the use of socially prescribed display rules. Children, on the other hand, appear more limited in how they interpret such discrepancies. They are likely to provide a literal, surface-level interpretation, and have difficulty constructing a higher order meaning from contradictory components (Bugental, Kaswan, & Love, 1970). The purpose of this article is to explore age-related changes in the ability to construct meaning from a particular subset of contradictory communications-those in which the content of verbal and facial channels convey inconsistent messages. Specifically, we asked how children of different ages make sense of a situation in which they are presented with two, contradictory emotional messages applied to a single referent. This simple case was chosen because there is evidence that even young children are sensitive to verbal-facial discrepancies (e.g., Volkmar, Hoder, &The research reported in this article was completed in partial fulfillment of a master's degree awarded to Cynthia Lightfoot and was funded by a grant to Merry Bullock from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.We thank Michael Chandler and James A. Russell for their helpful comments at earlier stages of the research.
