The confused robot: Two-year-olds' responses to breakdowns in conversation

Preschool children at two ages conversed with a toy robot during a play, se ssion. During the conversations the robot inserted either general (e.g., Wh at?) or specific (e.g., Piggy is in what?) contingent queries in response t o selected utterances. The children's replies to these breakdowns in conver sation indicated they were sensitive to the pragmatic requirements of these different types of query. By, 33 months of age, the children replied to ge neral queries with complete repetitions of their prior misunderstood uttera nce, and replied to specific queries with only the required constituent inf ormation. At 27 months of age, the children's predominant strategy was to r eply to both forms of query with complete repetitions, although the data su ggest some degree of sensitivity to these different forms is also present i n this younger group. These results are interpreted in terms of children's sensitivity to Grice's (1975) quantity rule and the potential changes in so cial cognition underlying children's compliance with this rule.