A Comparison of Three Methods of Training Communication Skills: Social Conflict, Modeling, and Conflict-Modeling

How Toddlers and Preschoolers Learn to Uniquely Identify Referents for Others: A Training Study

“…Other training studies have shown that schoolaged children improve on referential communication tests if they are (a) encouraged to focus on what is different about the referent in comparison to the other objects in view (Asher & Wigfield, 1981;Lefebvre-Pinard & Reid, 1980), (b) given adult models of how to describe referents (Whitehurst, 1976;Whitehurst, Sonnenschein, & Ianfolla, 1981), and (c) trained to assign blame for breakdowns in communication and given feedback on blame assignment (Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984). However, despite the considerable improvements made by children in these training studies (Sonnenschein & Whitehurst [1984] trained 5year-olds to the level of performance of typical 9-yearolds), few would claim that the training provided in these studies is representative of how children normally learn.…”

“…In addition to testing whether children would benefit from receiving feedback about their own communicative attempts, we also tested whether experiencing communicative breakdown from the addressee's perspective and from an onlooker's perspective would drive learning, as previous studies have shown to be the case for older children (e.g., Lefebvre-Pinard & Reid, 1980;Whitehurst, 1976). Thus, in the current study, we test whether 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds will benefit from being trained (a) in the speaker role with an experimenter giving feedback to the child as necessary with clarification requests, (b) in an addressee role where an experimenter-speaker sometimes refers to objects ambiguously and the child must attempt to understand, (c) in an onlooker role where the child observes an experimenter-speaker refer to objects (sometimes ambiguously) for an experimenter-addressee who attempts to understand and asks for clarification where necessary, and (d) in a model description condition where children are simply given models of appropriate object descriptions by an experimenter.…”

Improving Young Children's Listening by Verbal Self-Regulation: The Effect of Mode of Rule Presentation

“…The positive effect of the interrogati ve mode on the kindergartners ' perfo rm ance is pro babl y due to the fact that , by it s very nature, it forced the children to adopt a more ac tive cog nitive attitude about the information they were to process (Lefebv re-Pinard & Reid, 1980;Lefebv re-Pinard et a!. , 1982).…”

Children’s sensitivity to caregiver cues and the role of adult feedback in the developmentof referential communication

“…Comparing children's performance in studies with systematically different numbers and duration of training and testing trials can help us to understand whether children require a certain training regimen to acquire or improve their referential communication skills. Although children's initial communicative attempts are usually not sufficiently informative and often include a communicative failure, some early training studies demonstrated that children can repair their communicative failures by (1) directing their attention to the contrastive features of objects in referential settings (e.g., Asher & Wigfield, 1981;Lefebvre-Pinard & Reid, 1980), (2) observing adult models who are competent in referential communication (Whitehurst, 1976;Whitehurst, Sonnenschein, & Ianfolla, 1981), (3) experiencing (rather than observing) communicative breakdowns of their own (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;Robinson & Robinson, 1985;Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984), and (4) getting explicit feedback about the reason(s) for the inadequacy of their communicative message (Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984;Whitehurst, 1976;Whitehurst et al, 1981). A recent study (Matthews et al, 2007) found that the best way to boost children's referential performance was by enabling them to experience communicative breakdown and repair.…”