The growth of speaker and listener skills from five to eleven years

Abstract

The development of children's ability to become effective speakers and listeners once they have acquired language has been widely investigated using the referential communication paradigm. However, there has not been a systematic investigation of these abilities across the entire primary school age range. Given the importance of oral information in the classroom, the facility with which children encode and decode messages autonomously needs to be known. A balanced sample, with respect to age, sex and socio-economic status (SES), of 578 children (5-11 years) was given a 35-item test of speaker and listener skills using a variety of pictorial material. Results, which were scored using a response coding scheme, showed that the ability to respond as listeners to accurate messages was generally good, but significant improvement took place between 5 and 8 years. Speaker skills and listener skills were closely correlated, although only when the message received was ambiguous and required missing information to be sought. Average performance was initially at a low level (10% at 5 years, 18% at 6 years) and did not reach the 50% level of success until 9 years. Even by the end of the primary school period, accuracy was less than 70% of the possible score. Significant differences as a function of age and SES, but not sex, are reported. The reasons for, and the practical implications of, the protracted growth of these pragmatic skills are discussed.

The oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired children

“…The regression analysis also showed that the effect of age on accurate instructions was significant, both for the data set as a whole, and within the HI group. These findings suggest a developmental trend in speaking skills and support P. Lloyd et al's (1998) finding that referential communication skills develop throughout the primary school years.…”

How do 3- and 5-year-olds respond to under- and over-informative utterances?

“…Given that, by the age of 3, children are already processing complex noun phrases quite rapidly (Fernald et al, 2010), we predicted that 3-and 5-year-old children would be sensitive to both types of infelicities, resulting in longer reaction times and increased gaze checking on infelicitous trials. In addition, we predicted that the ability to take action by asking for clarification (in the under-informative cases) and visually searching the referential context (in the over-informative ones) would be stronger in the older group, presuming that knowledge of how to deal with problematic messages increases with age (Sonnenschein, 1982;Lloyd et al, 1998). Furthermore, looking at children's reactions to both under-and over-informative utterances allowed us to test whether individual differences in response to these two types of infelicity were correlated.…”

Examination of the relationship between false-belief understanding and referential communication skills

“…The listener receives, decodes, and evaluates the message. Such an accomplishment requires a deep level of processing (Lloyd 1994a;Lloyd et al 1998). In an ideal situation, the speaker's external representation (message) will fit the listener's internal representation of the information conveyed in the message (Asher 1979;Bonitatibus 1985Bonitatibus , 1988.…”