The role of social cognition in comprehension monitoring

Abstract

Two studies were conducted to examine the effect of children's social cognitions on their ability to monitor their comprehension in the referential communication paradigm. Specifically, it was hypothesized that children's beliefs about the intentions and cooperativeness of speakers prevent them from accurately evaluating messages. In Experiment 1, it was found that children who were made aware of the possibility that speakers themselves (rather than simply their words) might refer to more than one referent, were significantly better able to detect referential ambiguity than were children who, as in traditional referential communication studies, assumed that speakers attempted to describe a single referent. In Experiment 2, it was found that children faced with potentially uncooperative or dishonest speakers, carefully examined the words of referential directions and therefore detected more problems with those directions than children faced with honest, if potentially incompetent speakers. The results are discussed in terms of the interaction between the social and linguistic aspects of communication.A metalinguistic development that has received a good deal of attention recently is the phenomenon of comprehension monitoring. Specifically, between the ages of five and ten children become increasingly aware of how well they have understood verbal input. This awareness is usually assessed in the referential communication paradigm (Bonitatibus 1988a). Children * The authors wish to gratefully acknowledge the ideas, support and technical assistance of Carole Beale. We are also thankful for the assistance of the students, teachers, and parents of the Maple Avenue Elementary School, without whose cooperation this work would have been impossible. Thanks also to Lowell Roberts and Michael Carrier for assistance with data analysis.

The role of comprehension monitoring in Children's revision

“…As described earlier, children typically overestimate the communicative clarity of brief written messages in referential communication tasks. Yet there were hints in some studies that children might be aware of the target problems, without necessarily understanding that message ambiguity might lead to comprehension failure (Ackerman, 1981;Beal and Flavell, 1982;Bonitatibus, Godshall, Kelley, Levering, and Lynch, 1988;Patterson, O'Brien, Kister, Carter, and Kotsonis, 1981;Robinson, 1981;. For example, when kindergartners were asked to listen to ambiguous instructions for constructing block buildings (e.g., "Put the red block on the blue block"), they would often touch both possible blocks (e.g., red circle, red square) in turn before arbitrarily selecting one (FlaveU et al, 1981).…”

French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge

“…For example, they differ in terms of the following variables, all of which are essential for the introduction of referents: whether the narrator is familiar with the contents of the narrative, whether the addressee (adult or child) is physically present, and especially whether s/he shares knowledge about the referents. As has been shown by studies devoted to referential communication, variables related to the interlocutors' competence, including academic status, deafness, co-operativeness, affect speakers' performance (e.g., Anderson, Yule & Brown 1984, Bonitatibus, Godshall, Kelley, Levering & Lynch 1988, Brownell, Trehub & Gartner 1988). In addition, even in comparable communicative situations, children are asked to perform very different tasks, e.g., naming referents, describing unrelated pictures, narrating picture sequences, narrating films during versus after presentation, etc.…”

Evidence of Perspective-Taking Constraints in Children's On-Line Reference Resolution

“…Yet, although young children can recognize that information they themselves have access to may not be shared knowledge, they sometimes fail to introduce that information into discourse as needed. Researchers have shown that until the age of 7 or 8, children produce ambiguous utterances as speakers (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984) and fail to distinguish between ambiguous and informative utterances when selecting a referent (Ackerman, 1981;Ackerman, Szymanski, & Silver, 1990;Bonitatibus, Godshall, Kelley, Levering, & Lynch, 1988). Young children's egocentric communicative behavior is likely to reflect difficulty with implementing knowledge of a partner's needs, rather than a lack of general perspective-taking ability.…”