Telling children when and why listeners have or have not understood what a speaker meant is not a very effective way of advancing children's referential skills. If giving such information also modifies children's speaking and/or listening behavior, it is very effective. If the same modifications are produced by other means, consequences are…

Analysis of naturalistic data identified features of adult-child talk which occurred frequently at school but rarely at home. One of these features--question sequences intended to elicit an answer--was used in an intervention study and was found to promote young children's understanding of ambiguity in verbal messages. (PCB)

Thirty-six children between 4.4 and 5.4 years of age were assessed for understanding about the role of message ambiguity as a cause of communication failure and for level of performance in verbal referential communication tasks. Results show that training sessions illustrating when and why listeners understood or failed to understand were…

Four studies revealed that (1) children judged a wrongdoer in a story to feel happy; (2) the incidence of happy judgments did not decline with age; (3) the presence of their teacher had an effect on children's judgments; and (4) some children judged the wrongdoer to feel sad rather than scared. (BB)

Reports on five experiments regarding the ability of children ranging from four to seven years of age to decide when they did not have enough information to select an unfamiliar named picture. Concludes that avoidance of the undecidable was the result of the children's difficulty in understanding undecidability. (GH)