Influence of Sampling and Comparison Processes on the Development of Communication Effectiveness.

Abstract

Children's communication performance improves with age, which could result from increases in children's vocabularies, changes in their strategies of selecting messages from their vocabularies, or both. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate these explanations. Two types of communication tasks were employed. One task required that speakers have adequate vocabulary, while the other task had the additional requirement that speakers select their messages based on comparison activity. Results indicated that second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children were equally effective communicators on the former task and that younger children were poorer communicators on the latter task. These data suggest that younger children have inadequate comparison strategies.

Generalization of Training for Children's Listener Skills

“…While not specifically designed to test their hypothesis, data from the current study are consistent with the argument advanced by Asher and Parke (1975) that children's communication failures are due at least in part to a failure to compare referents and nonreferents with the speaker's messages. In this regard, it is worth noting that the training techniques employed here may have encouraged listeners to make these kinds of comparisons, as well as to take appropriate action when more information was needed.…”

Social Interaction, Social Competence, and Friendship in Children

“…This finding is consistent with Rubin's (1972) report of high positive partial correlations (with IQ held constant) between popularity and performance on the Glucksberg and Krauss (1967) referentialcommunication task. Asher and Parke (1975) reported that second graders made very few errors in referential communication on unrelated word pairs. However, a strong monotonic developmental effect was observed from second to sixth grade on the related-word-pairs list.…”

“…Third-and fourth-grade children were studied, since this age level appears to be one of transition in the development of social abilities (Asher & Parke 1975;Elkind 1961;Feffer 1959;Feffer & Gourevitch 1960;Flavell et al 1968;Glucksberg & Krauss 1967). Children came from two schools differing greatly in the economic and educational level of parents.…”

“…Izard (1971) studied children's ability to recognize and label emotions. A number of researchers using a wide variety of tasks have examined children's ability to communicate accurately to a listener (Asher & Parke 1975; Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis 1968; Glucksberg & Krauss 1967). Other investigators have assessed children's ability to take the role perspective of another person on perceptual (Piaget & Inhelder 1956) and social tasks (Feffer & Gourevitch 1960).…”

Visual Signals and the Communication Abilities of Children

“…Explanations for the poorer referential abilities of younger children range from language limitations (Asher & Wigfield, 1981), to cognitive restrictions (for example Glucksberg, Krauss & Weisberg, 1966;Asher & Parke, 1975). It is therefore predicted that if visual signals are less cognitively demanding, and children are able to represent knowledge gesturally before verbalizing it (as discussed above), then visual signals will play a particularly important role in the communication attempts of young children.…”