This study investigates the development of listener skills during childhood, and the effects of introducing a brief plan for effective listening on children's listener performances. The subjects were 96 children, 24 at each of four ages (four, six, eight, and ten years) who were asked to play the role of listener in a referential communication game. The speaker was an adult confederate who produced messages of variable informational adequacy. After a set of pretest trials on the communication game, half of the Ss received a plan for effective listening. All Ss then participated in a set of posttest trials on the game. Principal dependent measures were the number of requests for further information and the number of correct referent choices by each listener. Significant development of listener skills was observed; older children asked more questions and made more correct referent choices than younger children. The plan facilitated the listener performances of all but the four-year-olds. A content analysis indicated that very few of the children's questions were egocentric in nature; the vast majority were specific and task-relevant. (Author)