Plans and the development of listener skills.

Abstract

Research on children's referential communication has focused primarily on the role of the speaker; the listener's role has remained largely unexplored. The development of listener skills during childhood and the effects of introducing a brief plan for effective listening on children's listener performances were investigated in this study. Twenty-four children at each of four ages (4, 6, 8, and 10 years) played the role of listener in a referential communication game. The speaker was an adult confederate, who produced messages of varying informational adequacy. After 12 pretest trials on the communication game to assess baseline listener performance, half of the subjects were given a plan for effective listening. All subjects then participated in 12 additional trials. Significant development of listener skills was observed; older children asked more questions and chose more correct referents than younger children. The plan facilitated the performances of all but the 4year-olds. These findings suggest both the importance of the listener within the referential communication situation and the relevance of plans for efforts to facilitate the development of communication skills.In studies of referential communication, a tion between children in this kind of situaspeaker is asked to transmit, by purely verbal means, some specified information to a listener. These studies indicate that while communication between preschool children is often quite ineffective, accuracy of communication improves gradually over the elementary school years (Glucksberg,

Is perseveration caused by inhibition failure? Evidence from preschool children’s inferences about word meanings

“…One possibility is that children who perseverate do not notice that each trial (or word) in the FIM constitutes a new, or independent, problem. There is evidence that young children misconstrue vague or difficult questions as easy or determinate (Cosgrove & Patterson, 1977;Revelle, Wellman, & Karabenick, 1985;Speer, 1984). In particular, children as old as 5 years fail to notice when there are several possible solutions to a problem or question (Fabricius, Sophian, & Wellman, 1987).…”

Comprehension Monitoring: Identifying and Coping with Text Confusions

“…These shortcomings can be remedied by manipulating the comprehensibility of the text itself; failures to notice deliberately introduced confusions may provide evidence Comprehension Monitoring 4 of poor comprehension monitoring. This paradigm has been used to study the development of comprehension monitoring skills (Markman, 1977, in press), as well as referential communication (e.g., Cosgrove & Patterson, 1978;Ironsmith & Whitehurst, 1978). …”

Literature review on the preschool pedestrian

“…A later study with children from grades K,.1, 3 and 5 indicated there were no initial performance differences, but that practice rapidly improved performance for the older children (Krauss & Glucksberg, 1969). Whitehurst (1976) has also demonstrated a developmental improvement for speakers within this age range; Cosgrove and Patterson (1977) found a similar developmental trend for listeners of this age. Seven-year-olds are also somewhat better at utilizing listener feedback than four-year-olds, although the type of feedback offered seems to be a more dominant factor than age (Peterson, Danner, & Flavell, 1977).…”