How Toddlers and Preschoolers Learn to Uniquely Identify Referents for Others: A Training Study

This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and posttested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, children were assigned to a training condition...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2007-11, Vol.78 (6), p.1744-1759
Main Authors: Matthews, Danielle, Lieven, Elena, Tomasello, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ability tests
Age Factors
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child psychology
Child, Preschool
Children
Cognition & reasoning
Communication
Communication Skills
Concept Formation
Developmental psychology
Discrimination Learning
Empirical Articles
Feedback
Feedback (Response)
Feedback, Psychological
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gestures
Humans
Interpersonal Relations
Interpersonal Relationship
Language
Language acquisition
Language Development
Learning
Learning Processes
Male
Names
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Picture books
Preferences
Preschool Children
Pretests Posttests
Psycholinguistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Referents
Referring expressions
Relative clauses
School age children
Semantics
Skills
Training
Transfer of Training
Verbal Behavior
Vocabulary
Young children
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Summary:This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and posttested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, children were assigned to a training condition in which they (a) asked for stickers from an adult, (b) responded to an adult's requests for stickers, (c) observed 1 adult ask another for stickers, or (d) heard model descriptions of stickers. All conditions yielded improvements in referring strategies, with condition (a) being most effective. Four-year-olds additionally demonstrated learning effects in a transfer task. These results suggest that young children's communication skills develop best in response to feedback about their own attempts at reference.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01098.x