Many young children communicate poorly on tasks that require them to discriminate referents from nonreferents. The present research considered two explanations: (a) Poor communicators do not compare the associative strength of potential messages to the referent and nonreferent. (b) Poor communicators engage in an egocentric form of comparison activity such that their messages have private but not public meaning. The latter explanation implies that children who communicate poorly to another person could make effective use of their own messages. To examine these explanations, good and poor communicators from third and fifth grades were asked to identify referents from their own messages. The results indicated that children who communicated poorly were also less effective than good communicators on the self-communication task. These data suggest that poor communicators do not engage in comparison activity even for their own private understanding.Children's ability to communicate accurately to another person has been assessed using a wide variety of experimental tasks
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