Professionals and parents alike have long believed that good mothering is good for children. The endless stream of books on raising children and the financial success of such books constitute eloquent testimony both to the strength of this belief and to parents' uncertainty about what good mothering is. Indeed, over the years, experts' views of good mothering have undergone many changes (Lomax, Kagan, and Rosenkranu, 1978;Stendler, 1950;Wolfenstein, 1955). Empirical evidence on the relation between parental behavior and subsequent development has contributed little to this popular literature, but research in this domain continues to flourish.

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. Following 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 systematically 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 messages. 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.Effective verbal communication is a complex social-cognitive enterprise,

Normally hearing children (aged 4–10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6–14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed significantly better than hearing-impaired children. However, orally educated children with mild or moderate hearing losses did not perform better than children with severe or profound losses. Instead, hearingimpaired children exhibited marked metalinguistic deficits, regardless of their degree of hearing loss. Finally, bimodally educated children performed significantly worse than orally educated children on the metalinguistic tasks of the present study. The implications of these findings for educational instruction are discussed.