This paper traces the history and identifies current issues in referential communication from a European perspective. It is argued that an understanding of how children handle verbal messages is important for theoretical and applied (especially educational) reasons, but that a methodological shift is needed. An approach is outlined that uses tasks with clear goals that enable children to perceive the purpose of communication. Telephones replace the customary talking-through screens, which also removes the distorting presence of the experimenter. The implications of the experimenter traditionally playing the dual role of investigator and task communicator are examined. When the age of the children demands the presence of an adult, that person's contribution must be measured. Detailed coding of verbal and non-verbal behaviour, drawing on developments in discourse analysis, are outlined together with some illustrative findings. The paper concludes with some proposed future fruitful lines of enquiry. This article describes some recent work in the development of referential communication which constitutes a change in methodology. The work has profited from European collaboration and the paper generally reflects this. After briefly situating the field in its theoretical and historical context, the background to the work that we have done is presented. This focuses particularly on the limitations of what we call the standard approach. A summary of some of the significant European work of the past decade is followed by an illustrated account of our own work. The article concludes with a consideration of proposed fruitful new directions for this research area.The study of how children develop the ability to use language effectively, that is, to encode and decode verbal information, has clear European origins. Piaget's first major work, The Language and Thought of the Child (1926), examined the difficulties experienced by children between 4 and 8 years who were asked either to explain the operation of an instrument like a tap or recount a narrative that had been told to a child of similar age. The main defect noted by Piaget, egocentric speech, was Requests for reprints.
The nature of the message used by children, 4 1/2 and 6 1/2 year-old, was studied in a spatial description task. Speaker and listener were separated from one another by an opaque screen, and had to exchange information. Speaker were asked to describe a board showing eight objects placed in a room, and listeners were instructed to draw a similar picture on the basis of this description. The analysis of the message focused on the description of the object and the expression of spatial location. The results indicated the cognitive difficulty involved in having to distinguish referents according to the attribute and the use of grouping strategies. Although children's overall performance improved with age, the older group presented more messages of low informative quality related to objects that did not have a specific spatial frame of reference. These last results are discussed in terms of private speech that emerge when subjects' linguistic ability is insufficient to organise a complex cognitive situation. It appears that the cognitive features of the message play an important role both in the denotation of the referent and its spatial location.
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