Children' conceptions of relations between messages, meanings and reality

Abstract

The paper is in six sections. In the first, we summarize interpretations of the results of laboratory investigations in which children give or receive information about a particular object or event in the real world. In these studies there is assumed to be a match between the speaker' intended meaning (an internal representation) and the intended referent in the outside world, and it appears that 5–6‐year‐old children are often oblivious to the importance of a one‐to‐one relationship between meaning/referent and message. In the second section we offer a description to account for this: young children may treat the meaning of a message as being the intended outcome rather than the speaker' internal representation, and treat the message within its social context as being unproblematic, rather than as a clue from which it may or may not be possible to infer the intended meaning. In the third section we argue that experience of explicitly educational settings may be responsible for their achieving a conception of messages as being clues to internal representations, clues which may be inadequate. However, in the fourth section we show that there is little direct evidence concerning children' conceptions of meaning as internal representation. In the fifth section we show that children of this age appear to be able to handle relationships between internal representations and the real world when these are a straightforward match or mismatch, but they may not be able to do so in more complex cases such as those involving a slight mismatch. They may have equivalent difficulties with relationships between verbal messages and the internal representations which these express. In the final section we raise possible research issues for the future.

Use of Context in Pragmatic Language Comprehension by Children with Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism

“…Normally developing children start to use context as soon as they start to understand language, but only (9) 9 (8.9) 0.34 9 (9) 0.00 9 (8.9) 0.34 Enrichment (9) 7.5 (7.2) 1.47 9 (8.7) 0.49 9 (8.5) 0.73 Routine (9) 8.0 (7.9) 1.10 8.0 (8.0) 1.11 9 (8.6) 0.72 Basic implicature (9) 7.5 (7.1) 1.31 8.0 (7.8) 1.10 9 (8.7) 0.49 Feeling ( after development progresses they learn to understand more sophisticated contextual clues and start to draw relevant inferences by combining contextual information from different sources (Bezuidenhout & Sroda, 1998;Jaswal & Markman, 2001;Lloyd, Camaioni, & Ercolani, 1995;Milosky, 1992;Robinson & Whittaker, 1987). In children with AS or HFA the pattern of performance on the different question types was approximately the same as is predicted by the relevance theory on the basis of contextual complexity (Leinonen et al, 2003;Sperber & Wilson, 1995, p. 179-182, 2004.…”

Children's Interpretation of Messages from a Speaker with a False Belief

“…However, it has been argued on the basis of a different body of research that children younger than about 6 or 7 years of age fail to understand that messages are representations of speakers' intended meanings (Beal, 1988;Bonitatibus, 1988;Robinson, Goelman, & Olson, 1983;Robinson & Robinson, 1982;Robinson & Whittaker, 1987). One aim of this paper is to present new evidence which suggests that children's understanding of the relation between message and speakers' internal representation has been underestimated by these authors.…”

“…As Robinson and Whittaker (1987) point out, we cannot assume that children who correctly identify ambiguous messages as such are treating messages as being clues to speakers' internal representations. This is because in the typical procedure there is a perfect match between the speaker's internal representation and the desired object in the outside world.…”

“…Therefore, we can argue on the basis of findings already presented in the ambiguity literature that perhaps children's difficulty with ambiguity is not related to a difficulty they may have in dealing with internal representation as distinct from the message. Robinson and Whittaker (1987) suggested that a better way to investigate children's understanding of relations between messages and speakers' internal representations might be to use a procedure in which there is a mismatch between the speaker's internal representation and the intended referent in the outside world, so that it becomes possible to tell which of the two the child focuses on when interpreting the message. Such a procedure was developed by Ackerman (1979) and improved upon by Russell (1989, 1991;Mitchell, Munno, & Russell, 1991).…”

Children's Sensitivity to Their Own Relative Ignorance: Handling of Possibilities Under Epistemic and Physical Uncertainty

“…For example, under conditions of epistemic uncertainty as used in the published literature, Epistemic and physical uncertainty 11 children younger than around 7 years do not just make single interpretations of limited input but also evaluate the input as adequate (e.g. Beal & Flavell, 1982;Flavell, Speer, Green, & August, 1981;Robinson & Apperly, 2001;Robinson & Whittaker, 1987). They fail to explain why different people can make different interpretations of limited input (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996;Chandler, Hallet, & Sokol, 2002).…”