CHILDRENS SOURCE ERRORS IN REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION

As shown by children's failure to make the say-mean distinction in ref erential communication, young children often confuse utterance informa tion and referential knowledge gained from non-utterance sources. Five experiments examined the extent and nature of the referential source errors of 5- to 10-year old children. Children listened to short stori es containing a referential utterance that was informative about the i ntended referent in a display, informative only in combination with in formation in the story context, or ambiguous. After each story, the ch ildren independently evaluated the sufficiency of the story informatio n to identify the referent and whether the final utterance alone was t he source of sufficient information. Children's confusion of sources o f information internal to a story was determined by examining source e rrors for the contextually informative utterances. In addition, Experi ment 1 examined children's confusion of story information and external referent information provided by the experimenter. The other experime nts examined the roles of source similarity and memory access to verba tim information in referential reasoning and source memory. The result s showed considerable source confusion by the younger children, which seemed attributable in part to memory variables. Developmental differe nces in source confusion may reflect the greater independence of reaso ning and memory of older children. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.