Children's understanding of the communicative value of discrepant verbal messages

Cognitive Development, 6, 279-299 (1991)

Children's Understanding of the Communicative Value

of Discrepant Verbal Messages

Peter Mitchell University College of Swansea

Angelina Munno University of Birmingham

James Russell University of Cambridge

In three studies, children's understanding of the communicative value of discrepant messages that mismatched the item (a person) they were supposed to refer to was investigated. Children heard stories in which a speaker protagonist gave either an accurate, slightly discrepant, or grossly discrepant description. Like 8-, 9-, and 13-year-olds, 5-year-olds apparently recognized that discrepant messages might be informative, since they iudged very often that a listener would identify the referent person. They also seemed to be aware of the distinction between discrepant and accurate messages, since they judged listener success even more frequently in the event of the latter. Despite this, 5-year-olds seemed unaware of the relationship between informational value of a discrepant message and its benefit to listener knowledge: Those aged 8 years and older, but not those aged 5, judged more often that the listener would identify the referent person when the message was slightly discrepant than when it was grossly discrepant. It seems older children distinguish varying degrees of discrepancy, showing that they are attuned to the relationship between content of the discrepant message and states in the world that are referred to. This has an important implication for a further development of theory of mind in middle childhood.

The primary aim in the studies reported here was to begin to examine chi ldren 's unders tanding of the way in which discrepant verbal messages serve as good or bad clues to the identification of a referent. A discrepant message is defined as one in which the information in the message mismatches the item it purports to refer to. The s t imulus for this study came in part from previous research into

We are very grateful to E. J. Robinson for her comments on an earlier draft. Correspondence and requesls for reprints should be sent to Peter Mitchell, Department of Psy-

chology, University College of Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK.

Manuscript received November 27, 1990; revision accepted March 12, 1991 279

280 Peter Mitchell, Angelina Munno, and James Russell

young children's apparent lack of ability to make the distinction between what is said and what is meant, suggesting that they have difficulty giving joint consider- ation to literal and intended meaning when the latter is an imperfect expression of the former (e.g. Beal & Flavell, 1984; Bonitatibus, 1988; Mitchell & Russell, 1989, 1991; Robinson, Goelman, & Olson, 1983).

It seems that children have difficulty with the say-mean distinction not because they fixate exclusively on the literal or the nonliteral. Some studies show that young children make inappropriate nonliteral interpretations, as in the exam- ples reported by Donaldson (1978, especially Chapter 6), and at other times prefer interpretations that are too literal, as in their interpretations of sarcastic remarks (e.g., Ackerman, 1981, 1982, 1983; Demorest, Meyer, Phelps, Gardner, & Winner, 1984) and metaphors (Gardner, Winner, Bechofer, & Wolf, 1978; Winner, Rosentiel, & Gardner, 1976). Therefore, although children can focus on either the literal or the nonliteral, the studies on the say-mean distinction, particularly those by Beal and Flavell (1984) and Robinson et al. (1983), suggest that they have great difficulty attending to both simultaneously.

In contrast, Mitchell and Russell (1989, 1991) apparently identified early awareness of the say-mean distinction, in that 5-year-olds sometimes succeeded in judging that an object that mismatched the speaker's description was nonetheless the object the speaker intended. In this case, children seemed to recognize that the speaker had misdescribed the object, and therefore that a say-mean discrepancy had occurred.

This finding is at odds with what one might expect on the basis of the conclusions from studies using ambiguous messages. Here it was found that young children seem to focus too much on what they suppose is the intended meaning, instead of examining the literal meaning of the message, and fixating on the ambiguity engendered by it as a result. However, it might be that in the case of ambiguity, children are not alerted to the nature of the message as a good or bad characterization of intended meaning, given that an item consistent with the information in the message can be identified. Because of this, children may wrongly focus on their own act of choosing as a basis for assuming that all is well, instead of examining the informational value of the message in relation to the items before the listener (Mitchell & Robinson, 1990; Robinson & Mitchell, 1990). To make a correct judgment that an ambiguous message is inadequate, it would be necessary to focus actively on a negative: that there is an absence of other items also consistent with the description. This kind of reasoning may be especially difficult for young children.

Young children may find say-mean easier to handle in the case of misdescription rather than ambiguity because in misdescription there is no item consistent with the message, and therefore no selection of an item to lure the child into believing that the message is interpretable, and no negative to attend to (i.e., the absence of other items also consistent with the description); children can assess

Discrepant Messages 281

the message independently of performance on the task, and this may allow them to focus more easily on the message as a clue to meaning rather than taking the message automatically as being isomorphic with intended meaning.

Children's apparent difficulty with the say-mean distinction when messages are ambiguous seems to coincide with incorrect judgments that ambiguous messages are adequate and enable a listener to know which item in a set is being referred to (Beal & Flavell, 1984; Robinson & Robinson, 1983). Robinson and Whittaker (1987) made an explicit link between correct message evaluation and say-mean competence, suggesting young children's nonconception of the clue- like property of messages results in them failing to appreciate that a message could be a poor characterization of what the speaker intended, and therefore not an ideal clue to help select the item being referred to. However, it might be that children would exhibit greater understanding of the message as a useful or useless piece of information if it is discrepant rather than ambiguous. If it is discrepant, children could not be seduced by the possibility of choosing an item consistent with the message (unlike when ambiguous messages are presented), and therefore do not have to attend to a negative in order to make a correct judgment that the message is inadequate. Because of this, one may find that they can make insightful judgments about cognitive consequences when discrepant messages are presented.

If a message is discrepant, it is not necessarily useless. Indeed, Donnellan (1966, 1968) argued that a typical feature of real-life referential communication is the abundance of imperfect messages, yet adult listeners usually succeed in identifying the referent. Sperber and Wilson (1986) suggested how people may interpret imperfect messages with the aid of contextual features. They proposed that in interpreting speaker meaning, listeners look for the relevance of the message, which usually can be derived from the context.

If children have difficulty in conceptualizing messages as merely clues to meaning, we might find they would judge that a listener who heard only a slightly discrepant message would not be able to find the referent. If so, this might be viewed as resembling the literal bias young children sometimes display when making judgments about metaphor and sarcastic remarks.

Alternatively, children may appreciate that messages function as clues, and therefore that a discrepant description may help the listener identify the referent. Yet children may fail a more stringent test: They may judge that a listener would find a referent just as frequently after hearing a slightly discrepant message as after hearing a grossly discrepant one. Two published studies have examined, with conflicting results, children's judgments about the quality of messages which varied in the extent to which they were ambiguous. Patterson, O'Brien, Kister, Carter, and Kotsonis (1981) found young children were sensitive to extent of ambiguity in their message evaluations, but Robinson and Robinson (1977) found no such effect. Therefore, even if making judgments about ambiguous

282 Peter Mitchell, Angelina Munno, and lames Russell

messages was parallel to making judgments about discrepant messages, we are unable to formulate expectations about young children's ability to detect varying degrees of message inadequacy.

In Experiment 1, we began by presenting story vignettes in which a description varied between slightly and grossly discrepant in relation to the true appearance of a referent as depicted by the story narrative. We hoped to obtain age- related findings in children's judgments regarding the communicative value of these messages, in subsequent experiments, we further examined children's understanding of the informational value of the message by presenting correct descriptions and descriptions devoid of any informational content, as well as those that were slightly and grossly discrepant.

One aim of the experiments was to find out whether at certain ages children judge that any discrepant message prevents a listener from identifying the referent. If so, they would display a literal bias, perhaps resembling that observed in studies on metaphor and sarcasm. Alternatively, young children may judge discrepant messages to be adequate just as they judge ambiguous ones to be adequate. Another aim was to examine age-related changes in children's ability to distinguish varying degrees of discrepancy. This would tell us about a developing understanding of the informational significance of the relationship between discrepant message content and the world.

EXPERIMENT I

Method

Subjects. We tested 96 children (46 boys and 50 girls) from three different schools in Southport, U.K., forming three age groups of equal number. The children in the youngest group were aged 5;5 to 6;5 (M = 6;0). Those in the middle group were aged 9;5 to 10;4 (M = 9;10). Those in the oldest group were aged 13;5 to 14;5 (M = 14;0). The children were of upper-working- to middle- class socioeconomic background.

Materials. We prepared eight stories that were similar to, and included, the following example:

Simon had lost his football in the park. He wanted to find the park warden to find out i f he had seen the lost football. Simon asked a boy called Matthew where to find the park warden. Matthew looked round and saw the park warden standing some distance away. The park warden was eating a red rosy apple. But Matthew could not tell that it was an apple the park warden was eating. Matthew said to Simon: "The man eating the orange [bag of fish and chips] over there is the park warden."

Children answered three questions after each story, which were presented in the following sequence:


"lest Question: So what happened next? Did Simon manage to find the park warden or not?

Control Questions: I. What was the park warden eating'? 2. What did Matthew say the park warden was eating?

We varied the degree of discrepancy in the following way. In the case of a slightly discrepant description, the description was of an identifying object similar in general appearance to the object the referent person was holding (similar shape, color, and size), as in the relationship between apple/orange. In the case of a grossly discrepant description, the description was of an object of com- pletely different appearance (different shape, color, and size), as in the relationship between apple/bag of fish and chips.

Design and Procedure. Children heard all eight stories. In half of the stories, there was a slightly discrepant description, and in the rest, a grossly discrepant description. In order to ensure that each level of this repeated measures factor was represented an equal number of times by each story across children, we combined factorially each story with each level of the repeated measure. Consequently, stories I -4 were in the slightly discrepant condition and stories 5- 8 were in the grossly discrepant condition for half the children, whereas the reverse was the case for the rest of the children. We arranged the stories in a random sequence, and varied the presentation order of this systematically between subjects in a Latin square configuration.

Children listened to stories individually in a quiet room within each school. The experimenter began by asking the child about his or her favorite stories in an attempt to set the child at ease, and then explained that he was going to read some stories that had no ending. The experimenter added that it was the child's job to end the story: He or she would have to say what happens next. After the child agreed to do that, the experimenter began reading the stories and asking questions at the end of each. Children received no feedback regarding the correctness of answers to any of the questions.

Results and Discussion Each time children judged that the listener would find the referent, we recorded a score of I. We computed a 3 (Age) x 2 (Degree of Discrepancy) analysis of variance, the last factor a repeated measure. The effect associated with age was nonsignificant, F(2,93) = 2.74, but effects associated with degree of discrepancy and the interaction were significant, F(I,93) = 14.39, p < .001 and F(2,93) = 4.17, p < .05, respectively.

We computed an analysis of simple effects to help interpret the interaction. Examining the effect associated with the discrepancy variable in each age group independently, we found nonsignificance for children in the youngest group, F <


1, but children in the two older groups judged more often that the listener would find the referent person when the description was only slightly discrepant: 9- year-olds, F(I ,31) = 8.91, p < .01; 13-year-olds, F(1,31) = 7.74, p < .01. Examining age differences on each level of the discrepancy variable independently, we found a significant effect when the description was grossly discrepant, F(2,93) = 4.85, p < .05, but not when the description was slightly discrepant, F < 1. In the case of gross discrepancy, a Newman-Keuls paired comparison showed that the children in the older two groups were less likely to judge that the listener would find the referent person than children in the youngest group, p < .05 in both cases, but there was no difference between the children in the two older groups. In sum, Table 1 suggests that children in the youngest group differed from those in the older group in that they judged listener success just as frequently when the description was grossly discrepant as when it was slightly discrepant.

A finer examination of responses gave no reason to suppose that a subset of the younger children were sensitive to the degree of discrepancy when it came to making judgments about listener success. Only 3 out of the 32 children in the youngest group judged more often that the listener would find the referent when the description was slightly discrepant than when it was grossly discrepant. Twenty-six of the children judged equally often under both conditions that the listener would find the referent.

Table 1 indicates that overall children were proficient in registering the discrepancy between speaker description and the narrative in terms of the critical attribute of the referent. In particular, positive judgments to the test question by the 5-year-olds were much more common than were errors in answer to the memory questions, thus ruling out the possibility that their positive judgments were a consequence of failing to recognize the discrepancy between description and true appearance of the referent.

We compared judgments with the hypothetical chance mean of judging that

Table 1. The Mean Percentage of Judgments That the Listener Would Find the Referent in Experiment 1

Discrepancy

Age in Years Slight Gross

5 64.8(81.2) 65.5(76.6) 9 57.8(97.7) 42.3(95.3) 13 51.5(98.4) 35.2(96.9)

Note. The figures in parentheses are the mean percentage registering of the discrepancy between message and appearance of referent person as depicted in the narrative.


the listener would succeed on 50% of occasions. In all experimental cells the observed frequency did not differ from the chance frequency, except for children in the oldest group, who were likely to judge that the listener would not find the referent person when the description was grossly discrepant, t(31) = 2.12, p < .05. It may have been that 5-year-olds displayed a literal bias, judging that the listener would not find the referent person. This turned out not to be the case, and instead they seemed willing to accept that in many cases a problematic discrepant message would engender a successful outcome, just as they would judge problematic ambiguous messages to do the same. Note that responding at chance level does not mean necessarily the children were responding ad hoc or randomly. Rather, chance criterion serves as a yardstick to measure the frequency of positive judgments.

Overall, the findings suggest young children understand that discrepant descriptions may result in a listener identifying the referent person (on approximately 65% of occasions in this study), but offer no support for the possibility that young children distinguish varying degrees of discrepancy. Apparently, children did not recognize that a slightly discrepant message would be of more benefit to a listener than a grossly discrepant one.

EXPERIMENT 2

We presented three message conditions: slight, gross, and no discrepancy. If young children simply ignored the relationship between the actual appearance of the referent person and the speaker's description, they would judge listener success equally frequently under the no-discrepancy condition compared with the other two conditions. Alternatively, we might find that children judge listener success less often when there is a discrepancy than when there is no discrepancy, but find that their judgments are not influenced by the degree of discrepancy. Such an outcome would suggest that young children are sensitive to the possibility that a discrepant description might represent an impediment, but lack the more subtle understanding of the extent to which discrepant messages of differing informational value are of benefit. In this sense, they would not distinguish varying degrees of discrepancy.

In the previous experiment, we asked children to judge what would happen next rather than whether the listener knew who the referent person was, in order to avoid the mental verb to know, in case children had difficulty interpreting this (see Johnson, 1982). However, the criticism could be made that what changes with age is not sensitivity to informational value of discrepant messages, but less of a tendency to "import" reasons for the listener's ability to find the referent. The younger children may have been more willing to go beyond the story information, and assume the listener would find the referent person after having received correct information from a second speaker. In this case, extent of message discrepancy would have been of reduced importance to the younger


children. To get around this problem, we asked the children in Experiment 2, " . . . does Ilistener] now know who Ireferent personl is'?"

Finally, we asked control questions before the test question, and corrected children if they answered wrongly, thereby ensuring that they had registered the discrepancy (if there was one). Consequently, if children were insensitive to the degree of discrepancy, we could be confident it was not because of a lack of experimental power due to children sometimes failing to register the discrepancy.

Method We prepared nine stories using a similar formula to that used in Experiment I. We omitted the line stating the speaker could not tell what the object was because it seemed odd to provide that inlbrmation and then have the speaker give an accurate message under the no-discrepancy condition.

Immediately following each story, we presented the two control questions used in Experiment 1. If the child failed to give a satisfactory answer to the first control question, the experimenter repeated the whole story and asked the question once again (those who made an error always gave the correct answer on the second reading). If the child failed to give a satisfactory answer to the second control question, the experimenter repeated the speaker's message in the story, and then repeated the question (those who made an error always gave the correct answer on the second reading of the message). After children had answered the control questions correctly, the experimenter presented the test question: After Ispeaker] said that, does Ilistenerl now know who the Ireferent personl is'?

There was either a slight, a gross, or no discrepancy in equal numbers of stories (three). As in Experiment I, we combined factorially each story with each level of the repeated measure discrepancy factor, creating a between-subjects nuisance factor of three levels. Also as in Experiment 1, we arranged the stories in a random sequence, and varied the presentation order of this sequence systematically between subjects in a Latin square configuration.

After setting the child at ease, the experimenter explained that he was going to read nine short stories and ask questions at the end of each, and therefore that it was important lbr the child to listen carefully. The experimenter added that although all the stories were similar, there were important differences, and that the child should look out for these because it would help him or her answer the questions. We hoped this advice would provide an extra cue that it would be appropriate to answer the test question differently according to the kind of story. This might have produced greater sensitivity to informational value of messages.

Subjects. We tested 48 children (25 boys and 23 girls) from a school in Birmingham, U.K., which had a mainly working-class intake. The children were aged 5;7 to 6;6 (M = 6;1).


Results and Discussion We compared the three levels of the discrepancy factor in terms of positive judgments that the listener did know who the referent person was, using a one- way analysis of variance, F(2,94) = 13.70, p < .001. A Newman-Keuls analysis showed that positive judgments were substantially more common when there was no discrepancy (mean percentage of positive judgments was 93.0) compared with either the slight or gross discrepancy conditions (p < .01 in both cases). However, there was no difference between slight and gross discrepancy (mean percentage of positive judgments was 70.7 and 72.3, respectively).

We compared positive judgments under each discrepancy condition with the hypothetical chance mean of .judging positively on 50% of occasions. Under all three conditions, positive judgments were more common than would be expected on the basis of chance: no discrepancy, t(47) = 16.45, p < .001; slight discrepancy,/(47) = 4.15, p < .001; gross discrepancy, t(47) = 4.54, p < .001.

The results revealed that children nearly always judged positively that the listener did know who the referent person was when the message was accurate and there was no discrepancy. This indicates that the children appreciated that an accurate description benefits the knowledge state of the listener, and as a corol- lary, shows that the children were attending to and comprehending the stories. Children seemed to appreciate that a discrepant message would be of less benefit to the listener's state of knowledge, but nevertheless .judged that the listener knew who the referent person was after hearing a discrepant message on more than two thirds of occasions.

Although children discriminated between discrepancy and no discrepancy conditions, they did not discriminate between messages which differed in the degree of discrepancy. On the one hand, young children recognized that a discrepant message may be an impediment to listener knowledge. On the other hand, they lacked the more subtle understanding of the extent to which discrepant messages, which are of differing informational value, are of benefit to the knowledge state of a listener.

The frequency of positive .judgments under the discrepant message conditions was remarkably similar to that in the previous experiment, despite changes to the story and test question; the difference between Experiments I and 2 in this respect was only in the order of about 6%. This finding is consistent with the possibility that children interpreted the test questions used in Experiments I and 2 in the same way. However, although the frequency of positive judgments between experiments is similar, only in Experiment 2 did statistical analysis (comparing chance responding) show a clear preference for positive judgments.

We might have found in Experiment 2 that children were reluctant to give a positive judgment in response to a listener knowledge test question. If so, this would have suggested children based their positive judgments in Experiment I on a belief that the listener would eventually find the referent by seeking infor-


mation in addition to the information already given in the inadequate message. However, the finding in Experiment 2 makes such an explanation unlikely, and instead supports the idea that children judged positively only because they be- lieved discrepant information could be beneficial to the listener's knowledge state.

EXPERIMENT 3

The main issue we intended to address in the final experiment arose from the possibility that in the previous experiments young children based their positive judgments about the effect of discrepant messages on a criterion other than informational value of the message. In the previous experiments, the referent person was always mentioned by role, and so children may have made an assumption that that role per se would serve as a clue to identification and that the descriptive information of the message was largely redundant. It might be that what develops is not just simply attention to whether or not the descriptive information in the message is a good or bad clue to meaning, but also lesser dependence on the context as a clue to intended meaning (we categorize role of referent person as a contextual clue). If this is so, then two things might follow. First, young children would exhibit sensitivity to role as a clue to intended meaning by judging more often that a listener knew who the referent person was when mentioned by role rather than by name. Second, young children would display sensitivity to the informational value of messages when the role of the referent person was not available as an additional clue to intended meaning (i.e., when the referent person was mentioned by name). Therefore, in the present experiment the speaker mentioned the referent person either by his or her role, or by name with no role indicated.

In order to make the quality of descriptive information even more important for the purpose of identifying the referent, we added to the stories the statement that the referent person was in a group of people. Therefore, one could assess the message in terms of the likelihood that it would distinguish the referent person from other people who were present. A further modification was that we asked children to provide a justification for their judgment. We asked children why it was that the listener did (did not) know who the referent was.

Method

Subjects. We tested 72 children (33 boys and 39 girls) aged 5;0 to 6;0 (M = 5;5) and 72 children (35 boys and 37 girls) aged 7;9 to 9;0 (M = 8;7) from a school in Bedford, U.K., which had a mainly middle-class intake.

Materials. We prepared six stories similar to, and including, the following:


It was tile evening of the school pantomime. Janet wanted to get her magic wand from the cupboard in the changing room, but the cupboard was locked and Janet didn't have the key. Janet went into the hall and told Mrs. Riley, the music teacher. Mrs, Riley told Janet to go and find the caretaker (Fred) because he had the key. Janet said, "But I don't know who the caretaker (Fred) is. Where can I find him?" Mrs. Riley looked round and saw the caretaker (Fred) standing some distance away with some people. He was holding a pen. Mrs. Riley said to Janet: I. "He's somewhere over there." 2. "He's somewhere over there. He's holding some boxes." 3. "He's somewhere over there. He's holding a pencil."

Four questions arranged within three categories of questions followed each story:

Control Questions: la. What did Mrs, Riley say the caretaker (Fred) was holding? lb. What did Mrs. Riley say to Janet? 2. What was the caretaker (Fred) holding? Test Question: Does Janet now know who the caretaker (Fred) is? Justification Question: Why does (doesn't) Janet now know who the care-

taker (Fred) is?

For stories ending in a discrepant message, we asked Control la, and for stories ending in no descriptive information, we asked Control lb.

Design and Procedure. Each child heard all six stories, two of which ended with the speaker providing no description of the referent, two ending with a slightly discrepant description, and two ending with a grossly discrepant description. So that each level of this repeated measures factor was represented an equal number of times by each story across the children, we combined factorially each story with each of the three levels. For each age group, half of the children heard stories in which the referent was referred to according to his or her role and the other half heard stories in which the referent was referred to by name. We ordered the stories randomly, and varied the presentation order as described previously.

The procedure was similar to that used in the previous experiment, with the exception that children also answered a justification question in the present experiment. If children did not answer the justification question within 20 sec- onds, the experimenter made a note of this and then gave a prompt, such as "Do you know?" or "What do you think?". The experimenter copied down the child's replies verbatim.


Results and Discussion

Judgments. We coded each judgment that the listener knew who the referent was by recording a score of l, and began with a 2(Age) x 2(Role/Name) × 3(Description Condition) analysis of variance, the last factor a repeated measure. There was a significant main effect associated with age of subject, due to children in the younger group making positive judgments more often than those in the older group, F(1,140) = 66.94, p < .001. The only other significant main effect was associated with description condition, F(2,280) = 6.02, p = .003. All other Fs were < 1, except for the main effect associated with role/name, F = 1.25, n.s. The data are summarized in Table 2.

We did not find an interaction similar to that reported in Experiment I, resulting from children in the older group adjusting their judgments to the informational value of the message, but not children in the younger group. To find out directly if younger subjects were sensitive to the message condition, we computed a 2(Role/Name) x 3(Description Condition) analysis of variance, the last factor a repeated measure, on data provided by 5-year-olds only. None of the effects were significant, and the F-value associated with description condition was well short of significance, F(2,140) = 1.56, n.s.. Both other Fs were < 1.

We computed an analysis of the same design on data provided by children in the older group only. There was just one significant effect, and that was associated with the description condition, F(2,140) = 4.63, p < .01. A Newman- Keuls analysis revealed more judgements that the listener knew who the referent was when a slightly discrepant description was given versus a grossly discrepant

Table 2. Experiment 3. Mean Percentage Judgments That the Listener Knew Who the Referent Person Was (The Referent Person Was Referred to Either by Name or by Role.)

Description

G N S

5-Year-Olds Name 80.6 83.4 87.5 Role 82.0 84.7 87.5

8-Year-Olds Name 26.4 40.3 43.1 Role 44.5 43.1 54.2

Note. G= grossly incorrect description; N= no useful information; S= slightly incorrect description


one, p < .01. However, comparisons involving each of these conditions with the no-description condition were nonsignificant. It appears older children judged that the listener knew who the referent was least often when the description was grossly discrepant and most often when it was slightly discrepant, and judged at an intermediate level when the speaker gave no descriptive information. The older children may have perceived the condition with no description to be neutral with regard to the likelihood of the listener knowing who the referent was, the slightly discrepant message to be helpful, and the grossly discrepant message to be an impediment.

Collapsing over the role/name factor (because no effects were associated with this in either age group), we compared judgments against chance (responding positively on 50% of occasions). Under each of the three description conditions, children in the younger group judged positively more frequently than would be expected on the basis of chance: slight discrepancy, t(71) = 11.06, p < .001; no description, t(71) = 9.06, p < .001; gross discrepancy, t(71) = 8.14, p < .001. It is apparent from Table 2 that 5-year-olds were slightly more likely to judge positively in this experiment compared with the previous ones, which might be due to differences in the stories presented. Children in the older group either did not differ from chance or judged positively less than chance, as in the case of a gross discrepancy: slight discrepancy, t(71) = 0.28, n.s.; no description, t(71) = 1.62, n.s.; gross discrepancy, t(71) = 3.50, p < .001. The findings for the older children replicate those of Experiment 1 in this respect.

The finding that children in the younger group judged positively very often even when the name and not just when the role of the referent person was used, suggests that in the previous experiments children did not judge positively because they assumed role would serve as a clue to the identity of the referent person. Also, there was no evidence to suggest younger children were influenced by degree of discrepancy when a name was used for the referent person. There- fore, it remains plausible that the younger children assumed a discrepant message would allow a listener to know who was being referred to, irrespective of the extent of discrepancy in that message.

Justifications. We placed each justification into one of three categories:

1. Speaker/Message/Attribute: These were any justifications that mentioned the content of the message, or the fact that a message had been given, or any justification that referred to the critical attribute of the referent (e.g., " . . . she said he was holding a tin of b e a n s . . , she said the wrong thing . . . the man was holding a pen . . .").

2. Listener/Context/Referent: These were any justifications that mentioned behavior or knowledge of the listener, aspects of the context, or the appearance of the referent other than his or her critical attribute (e.g.,


.

" . . . there was a c r o w d . . , he hasn't met h i m . . , she went up to him . . ."). Don ' t Know/Prompt: These were instances in which children said that they did not know, and any justifications that followed a prompt.

We entered justifications that conformed to both categories 1 and 2 into category 1 only (e .g. , "He was in a crowd and he was holding a pen . . ."). That is,

justifications in category 1 were given priority over those in category 2. Justifica- tions were categorized by the first two authors, and interrater agreement was 93.2%. In the event of disagreement, we accepted the decision of the first author.

Table 3 displays the percentage of entries in each kind of justification category. Two differences between the age groups are evident. One is that older children were very much more likely than younger children to mention the speaker or the message. Sixty-eight older children gave at least one justification relevant to the message, whereas only 41 younger children gave at least one justification in this category, X 2 (corrected) = 25.5, p < .001. The other difference between age groups is that younger children were more likely than older ones to judge "don ' t know" or require prompting. Thirty-four younger children had at least one justification in category 3, whereas only 7 older children had at least one justification in this category, X 2 (corrected) = 23.1, p < .001. However, the younger children were much more likely than the older ones to judge that the listener did know who the referent was. Therefore, the difference between ages in justifications given could have been a consequence of a covarying difference between ages in judgments. Note that it does not follow necessarily that positive judgments ought to produce justifications that concern the nature of descriptive

Table 3. Experiment 3. Mean Percentage of Justif ications for Judging That the Listener Did or Did Not Know Who the Referent Person Was

Justification Category

S/M L/C/R DK/P

5-Year.OIds Name 37.0 33.8 29.2 Role 26.0 38.0 36.0

8-Year-OIds Name 70.8 27.8 1.4 Role 60.2 38.0 1.8

Note. S/M was any justification referring to the speaker, the message, or the critical attribute of the referent person; L/C/R was any justification referring to the behavior of the listener, aspects of the context, role of the speaker, and so on; DK/P was any response of "don't know" or any prompted justification.


information in the message: Reference to the message could be used to justify either positive or negative judgments.

To control for differences in judgments between the two age groups, we based a between-age comparison only on justifications that accompanied judgments that the listener knew who the referent was. For each subject, we calculated the proportion of justifications relating to the message following positive judgments, and found that older children were more likely to provide message-relevant justifications, Mann-Whitney U = 1058, p < .0003. This age difference was still evident even when we excluded all justifications in the Don't Know/Prompt category, U = 1047, p = .004. Thus, 8-year-olds were more likely to give message-relevant justifications than 5-year-olds were, and this was not because the older children were less likely to judge that the listener knew who the referent was or because the 5-year-olds often failed to provide a spontaneous justification. It seems, therefore, that the older children attached more significance to the nature of the message in judging whether or not the listener knew who the referent person was.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Children aged 5 years often judged that a protagonist who heard a discrepant message would identify the person being referred to (on approximately 65-85% of occasions). Children aged 8 years and older judged less frequently that the listener now knew who the referent person was, particularly when the message was grossly discrepant. Older children also judged positively less often than the youngest subjects when asked if the listener would find the referent person and the message was grossly discrepant.

We might have found that the younger children judged positively less often than the older ones, having a literal bias of the kind evident in studies on metaphor (Gardner et al., 1978; Winner et al., 1976) and sarcasm (Ackerman, 1981, 1982, 1983; Demorest et al., 1984), but this was not the case. The younger children frequently judged positively, as they do in studies in which ambiguous messages are presented. In the latter studies, young children may have judged positively according to the criterion that it was possible to choose an item in the set consistent with the description (cf. Mitchell & Robinson, 1990). In the scenarios we presented, though, that was impossible. Therefore it seems young children's positive judgments were not due purely to a focus on being able to choose an item consistent with the description.

It is possible for a discrepant message to provide useful information. For example, if a speaker said, "The man holding the pen is the manager," when in fact it was a pencil the manager was holding, it is likely that the information "holding pen" would be a very useful clue to identification. For this reason, a discrepant message appears to have much better potential as a useful clue than an ambiguous message: If the same message had been given, but two men were


holding pens, it would be impossible to determine which man was the referent without additional information.

The results suggest 5-year-olds are sensitive to the possibility that despite the message being discrepant, the listener may still understand what the speaker was attempting to communicate: They often judged that the listener would identify the referent person following the discrepant message. When the message was slightly discrepant, it seems appropriate to deem such judgments correct, unlike when messages are ambiguous. Such judgments seem correct given that even the oldest subjects we tested frequently judged listener success when the message was slightly discrepant. In contrast, there is very little evidence in the literature of older children giving positive evaluations of ambiguous messages.

An alternative explanation of young children's positive responses is that they did not have much understanding of the stories at all, and responded positively by default, reflecting a positive response bias. This interpretation seems unlikely for several reasons. First, there is independent evidence that they did com- prehend the stories adequately given their correct judgments to the memory questions in Experiment 1. Second, Mitchell and Russell (1989, Experiment 1) presented superficially similar stories, this time asking if a discrepant object was the one the speaker intended. To this question, 5-year-olds usually answered "no," even though they judged that the listener who found the object would return with it to the speaker. This suggests that although these 5-year-olds judged the object not to be the one intended, they seemed to believe that the object would satisfy the speaker's requirement. That is, they seemed to accept that pragmatically the communication would result in a successful outcome. Thus, it is not inevitable that young children will give a positive response to questions about stories like those used in the present series of studies. Rather, it seems that their positive judgments might be specific to questions about the pragmatic adequacy of problematic messages. Third, Experiment 2 demonstrated that young children must have paid some attention to the discrepancy when making their judgments, because positive judgments in Experiment 2 were considerably more common when there was no discrepancy. For the preceding reasons we can assume the young children were good at comprehending the stories, and that positive responses to test questions were not inevitable.

The finding shows that 5-year-olds are aware of the distinction between discrepant and accurate messages. In particular, it seems they recognize that discrepant messages can present an impediment to listener understanding on some occasions, even though they usually judged discrepant messages would pose no problem. As such, young children exhibited some awareness of the relationship between the informational value of messages and listener knowledge. This possibility has implications for a conclusion arrived at by Sonnenschein (1986). She attempted to reconcile studies that found young children to be sensitive to the informational requirements of their listeners (e.g., Guralnick & PauI-Brow,a. 1977; Maratsos, 1973; Menig-Peterson, 1975; Shatz & Gelman, 1973) with


those that suggest young children do not understand that messages can be ambiguous, and therefore that they lack one requirement for understanding the informational needs of their listeners (e.g., Flavell, Speer, Green, & August, 1981; Robinson & Whittaker, 1987).

Sonnenschein (1986) found that while both 6- and 10-year-olds provided more information when the listener did not share background knowledge with them, only in the case of the older group was the additional information uniquely relevant to the appearance of the target object (which was a member of a larger set of items). All children seemed to know about the convention of giving more information when the listener did not share background knowledge, but only the older subjects displayed understanding of the need for an improvement in the informational value of the message in the event of a listener lacking prior knowledge. This finding is consistent with only the older children understanding the importance of the link between informational value of the message and listener knowledge state.

However, our finding in Experiment 2 demonstrates on a group basis that 5- year-olds do know something about the link between informational value of a message and listener understanding. They judged more often that a listener who heard an accurate message would identify the referent person, compared with a listener who heard a discrepant message.

This finding also adds to that reported by Robinson and Whittaker (1986), indicating 5-year-olds understand that messages communicate. They reported that children successfully judged that a puppet who received communication (that happened to be inaudible to the child observer) knew a critical fact, whereas a puppet who interacted with the experimenter in a noncommunicative way (by shaking hands) did not know. Our finding shows, however, that not only do children of this age know that messages communicate, but they have at least some understanding that message content is relevant to listener knowledge, and therefore to the communication process.

Nonetheless, although young children may know something about the relationship between informational value of message and listener knowledge, their ability to demonstrate this understanding across a variety of contexts could be severely limited. First, difficulty is evident in studies presenting ambiguous messages, as evidenced by Sonnenschein's 6-year-olds' apparent inability to provide information that is uniquely relevant to the target item. As already amplified in the beginning of this article, this might arise due to a difficulty in attending to a negative, which success with ambiguous messages demands. Second, our findings suggest that young children do not distinguish varying degrees of discrepancy, indicating that in this respect they lack a basis for understanding the connection between informational value of message and listener knowledge. In sum, young children seem to understand something about this relationship, but this understanding is restricted.

Sperber and Wilson's (1986) theory of relevance helps illuminate the dif-


ference between 5- and 8-year-olds in their understanding of imperfect messages. Sperber and Wilson proposed that listeners are engaged in the assessment of relevance of the message regarding the speaker's intention, governed by the principle of least effort. This is an inferential activity, aided by attention to contextual factors accompanying the message. It seems children of 8 years and above appreciate that a slightly discrepant message is sufficiently relevant to the speaker's intention given the context, that in this case it would enable the listener to identify the referent. For example, children seemed to recognize that a red apple is sufficiently close to an orange, and therefore relevant enough given the context, for the slightly incorrect description to afford identification. However, when the message is grossly discrepant, older children's inclination to judge communication failure is consistent with their judging that the description is not sufficiently relevant to speaker intention for the listener to identify it. In this sense, our findings concerning varying degrees of discrepant messages are consistent with the 8-year-olds having a sensitivity to the principle of relevance, but not the 5-year-olds.

Our findings could have important implications for further development of a theory of mind into middle childhood. Many tests demonstrate that by the age of 4 years, most children display understanding that people have belief states that can be distinct from reality (e.g., Astington & Gopnik, 1988; Flavell, 1988; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991; Perner, 1988; Wimmer & Hartl, 1991; Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Zaitchik, 1990). Some tests demonstrate rudiments of a theory of mind even before this age (e.g., Bartsch & Wellman, 1989; Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Leslie, 1987; Lewis & Osborne, 1990; Mitchell & Lacohee, 1991; Robinson & Mitchell, 1991; Wellman & Bartsch, 1988). However, some authors have alerted us to the continuing development of a theory of mind well into middle childhood (e.g., Chandler, 1988; Fabricius, Schwanenflugel, Barclay, & Denton, 1989; Russell, 1988). In particular, Fabricius et al.'s findings suggest that considerable development could take place prior to age 10 in the understanding of the role played by memory in representational activities.

Our findings contribute to this picture in an important way. They suggest that by age 8 or 9 the child has come to distinguish varying degrees of discrepancy between message and the thing being referred to. This shows that they, but perhaps not younger children, have become attuned to informational content of a discrepant message and the listener's consequent knowledge state. For an im- proved theory of mind, the child needs to understand that discrepant messages are informative, but more than this, needs to know that there is a relationship between degree of discrepancy and informativeness of message. As Wimmer, Hogrefe and Sodian (1988) argue, without understanding of the link between information and knowledge, the individual necessarily lacks understanding of the knowledge stored by the mind. An implication of our finding is that because young children lack understanding of one aspect of this link, they correspon- dingly lack understanding of the mind as an information processor and store.


As a source o f informat ion, verbal communica t ion has a special status. It can

furnish the l istener with knowledge of a fairly direct nature about the content o f

another person 's mind. That is, communica t ion is very often an externalizat ion

of the speaker ' s internal representat ion, and provides a more or less transparent

window into someone e lse ' s head: What someone says about something is re-

veal ing not only about that thing, but also could be reveal ing about the person 's

bel ief about that thing. We use language as a medium of communica t ion . There-

lore, the more the child knows about the relationship between the language used

in communica t ion and the thing in the world being referred to (e .g. , degree of

discrepancy), the better are the chi ld ' s credentials for understanding representa-

tions in the mind. Our findings suggest that in this respect, the credentials o f the

8-year-old might be considerably better than those o f the 5-year-old.

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Children's understanding of the communicative value of discrepant verbal messages

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