DOES DRAWING ATTENTION TO THE REFERENT CONSTRAIN THE WAY IN WHICH CHILDREN CONSTRUCT VERBAL MESSAGES

Tasks which assess children's speaker skills in the referential commun ication paradigm frequently mark the target item in some way to indica te which picture should be described. It was hypothesized that this pr ocedure would interfere with effective scanning of the visual array (c omparison processing) assumed to be necessary for the production of ac curate messages. It was also predicted that, when one item was highlig hted, more redundant features would be included in messages. An experi ment which compared a marked with an unmarked target condition across three age ranges (6, 8, 10 years) found that message accuracy was not affected by highlighting. But significantly move redundant features we re reported in the marked condition, indicating that, where redundancy is the focus of interest, a highlighting procedure should be avoided. Two age effects were also found: Message accuracy improved with age, while redundancy reduced with age.