Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of almost identical events to a passive confederate listener who could either see or not see the referents. Adults provided disambiguating information that picked out the target event but children massively failed to do so (even though 5-year-olds were more informative than 4-year-olds). Furthermore, both children and adults were more likely to mention atypical than typical disambiguating event components. Because of the contrastive nature of the task, the listener’s visual access had no effects on production. Experiment 2 was a more interactive version of Experiment 1 where participants played a guessing game with a “naïve” listener. In this context, children (and adults) became overall more informative, and the difference between child groups disappeared. We conclude that the informativeness of children’s event descriptions is heavily context-dependent and is boosted when children engage in a collaborative interaction with a “true” interlocutor.

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Adults design utterances to match listeners' informational needs by making both “generic” adjustments (e.g., mentioning atypical more often than typical information) and “particular” adjustments tailored to their specific interlocutor (e.g., including things that their addressee cannot see). For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. Three experiments investigated how generic and particular factors affect children's production. In Experiment 1, 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children and adults described typical and atypical instrument events to a silent listener who could either see or not see the events. In later extensions, participants described the same events to either a silent (Experiment 2) or an interactive (Experiment 3) addressee with a specific goal. Both adults and 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds performed generic adjustments but, unlike adults, children made listener‐particular adjustments inconsistently. These and prior findings can be explained by assuming that particular adjustments can be costlier for children to implement compared to generic adjustments.

Across languages, children produce locative back earlier and more frequently than front, but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a semantic misanalysis explanation, early meanings for front and back are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, pragmatic inference explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of front and back; the profile of back can be explained by the fact that occlusion is more noteworthy compared with visibility. We used cross-linguistic data to test these two hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined the production and comprehension of front/back by 3- and 4-year-old children and adults speaking two different languages (English and Greek). Children, unlike adults, used back more frequently than front in both languages; however, no such asymmetry surfaced in the comprehension of the two prepositions. In Experiment 2, both adults and children from the same language groups showed the front/back asymmetry when describing a more variable battery of spatial stimuli. Our results support the pragmatic inference hypothesis. We conclude that the emergence of spatial terms does not solely index semantic development but may be linked to pragmatic factors that also shape adults’ production of spatial language cross-linguistically.

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