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Children's understanding of referential messages produced by deaf and hearing speakers

Marni D. Brownell

University of Toronto

Sandra E. Trehub

University of Toronto

Gloria M. Gartner

University of Toronto

Children 4 to 10 years of age were presented with referential messages that varied in message adequacy and speech quality and were required to choose the intended referent from a set of four alternatives. Follow ing feedback regarding their choice, they evaluated the message as good or bad and provided reasons for their evaluation. Half of the messages had sufficient information to define the referent uniquely; half had insufficient or ambiguous information. Moreover, half of the messages were produced by hearing children and half by deaf children. Children's comprehension and evaluation of messages changed sys tematically with age, as did the basis for these evaluations. The 4- and 5-year-olds performed poorly on the picture selection task but evaluated most messages as good; 6-year-olds rated messages as good if they had chosen the correct referent, even by guessing. From 8 years of age, children judged the adequacy of messages independent of outcome and linked their justifications to relevant details of the mes sages. Messages that were fully intelligible to adults but had atypical speech quality resulted in poorer performance and evaluations than did messages with normal speech quality for children of all ages.

First Language, Vol. 8, No. 24, 271-286 (1988)
DOI: 10.1177/014272378800802405
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