Effect of presenting a message in written form on young children's ability to evaluate its communication adequacy.

Bonitatibus, Gary J.; Flavell, John H.

doi:10.1037/0012-1649.21.3.455

Cited by 21 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…In a series of experiments, however, FlaveU and colleagues obtained improvements in judgments of message ambiguity by experimental manipulations. For example, not knowing which of two objects was the intended referent made it easier for first graders to say that an ambiguous message could refer to more than one object (Beal & Flavell, 1984), as did providing a written version of the message to be judged (Bonitatibus & Flavell, 1985). This work would suggest, then, that under some conditions children find it easier to make appropriate judgments of the ambiguity of a message.…”

Section: Research On the Say/mean Distinctionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Development of the metalanguage and the acquisition of literacy: A progress report

Torrance

Olson

1987

Interchange

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Our research interests over the past decade have focussed on the nature and consequences of literacy. In pursuit of these interests, we have advanced a theory of the relationship between the development of literacy and oral language competence, a theory which takes literacy as involving not only the ability to read and write but also a particular orientation to language, mind, and the world. Our effort has been to contribute to a general theory of the nature and consequences of literacy which would throw new light on the problems of learning to read and write. Our guiding assumption was that reading and writing are not simply skills which children acquire. Rather, learning to read and write are aspects of coming to live in and to understand and participate in a literate society, a literate society being distinguished by, at least, the following four properties: a tradition of writing and accumulating texts; the development of institutions for using texts; an evolved metalanguage for interpreting and otherwise orally talking about written texts; and institutions, primarily schools, for the induction of children into this literate society.Many writers have attempted to characterize these distinctive properties of a literate society, including such scholars as Havelock, McLuhan, Goody and Watt, and Ong. Our stance, based on the work of these writers, has been to look for evidence that a central dimension of literacy is the development of a particular attitude toward language, the treatment of language as an object, or, in other words, the treatment of text as an autonomous representation of meaning. What children 136Interchange 18/1-2 © The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 1987

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Section: Research On the Say/mean Distinctionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Development of the metalanguage and the acquisition of literacy: A progress report

Torrance

Olson

1987

Interchange

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“…It is possible that the instructions helped children to focus on the literal meaning of the message and to ignore the speaker's intended meaning. Numerous studies have proposed that young children tend to focus mote on the speaker's intention than on the literal meaning of the message and that this may be the prime factor accounting for their poor performance as listeners (Ackerman, 1981;Bed & Flavell, 1984;Bonitatibus, 1988;Bonitatibus & Flavell, 1985;Robinson & Whittaker, 1985). Their reliance on the guessing strategy may be symptomatic of a more fundamental difficulty with their conception of the listener role (Speer, 1984).…”

Section: Guessing Strategymentioning

confidence: 94%

Young Children's Difficulty with Ambiguous Messages: Guessing Strategy or Comprehension Monitoring Deficiency?

Reid

1990

The Journal of Genetic Psychology

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“…Other studies (Bonitatibus and Flavell, 1985;Torrance et al, unpubiished) suggest that if the speaker's message is in the form of a written text, children are much more likely to notice the ambiguity of the utterance and acknowledge that the listener will have no grounds for any particular belief. Such findings suggest that literacy plays some role in sorting out these distinctions.…”

Section: Autonomy Of Meaningmentioning

confidence: 98%

Part l. Views on the autonomy of text

1991

Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse

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appropriate Interpretation is more readily reconstructed by the reader. Thus, instead of simply writing 'today', the writer may add a clause or phrase such äs 'September 15, 1989'. Indeed, Chafe (this issue) and Halliday (1987) have shown that written texts frequently exploit nominalization äs an important means for fixing reference and for turning complex relations into subjects of sentences. Such devices help to create a kind of text which is quite different from more interactive and contextualized forms of oral discourse. It is this set of properties of written texts that I have characterized äs autonomous. In this paper I shall discuss how written texts develop these properties and how these properties in turn, call for distinctive processes of Interpretation.Recent writers have pointed out that such autonomous texts are not unique to literate traditions. Narasimhan (i.p.) points to the fixity of traditional Indian Vedic poetry. Since 600 BC a single Standard version of the Rgveda has been preserved and transmitted from generation to generation. The fixity of form is guaranteed by ingenious mnemotechnics which involve various transformations on the text, treating separate words, separate consonants and vowels and the like. Consequently, oral performances of these Vedas in different parts of India are all identical. This is achieved without the use of writing äs a device to fix text and to serve äs a Standard for reproduction. Goody (1987: 122), however, has argued that the Vedas 'bear all the hallmarks of a literate culture', in that the mnemonics invented appear to be based on a written transcript rather than on a memorized text. Nonetheless, some oral texts such äs chants, incantations, prayers and proverbial Statements appear to involve the preservation of linguistic form.Feldman (i.p.), too, has pointed out that ordinary oral discourse has devices for fixing text in such a way that it can bc refcrred to in subsequent discourse, direct quotation being a clear and simple example. She cites numerous cases of discourse in traditional societies in which the speech of one person becomes the object of a second person's speech. Turning speech into an object of discourse is one means of 'freezing' a text. Just what is frozen, the wording or the semantic content or some combination, remains to be seen. On the other hand, Cazden (1989) has pointed out that language always requires a non-linguistic context for Interpretation and consequently written language cannot be any more autonomous than speech.Hence, it can no longer be simply argued that the fact that the language is oral rather than written in itself determines that it will have a diiferent form. Rather, the differences are to be found in texts in which writers attempt to accommodate to the needs of readers through adopting particular linguistic devices such äs those for dealing with indexicals äs men-

show abstract

Effect of presenting a message in written form on young children's ability to evaluate its communication adequacy.

Cited by 21 publications

References 4 publications

Development of the metalanguage and the acquisition of literacy: A progress report

Development of the metalanguage and the acquisition of literacy: A progress report

Young Children's Difficulty with Ambiguous Messages: Guessing Strategy or Comprehension Monitoring Deficiency?

Part l. Views on the autonomy of text

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