title: How toddlers and preschoolers learn to uniquely identify referents for others: a training study.
abstract: This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and posttested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, children were assigned to a training condition in which they (a) asked for stickers from an adult, (b) responded to an adult's requests for stickers, (c) observed 1 adult ask another for stickers, or (d) heard model descriptions of stickers. All conditions yielded improvements in referring strategies, with condition (a) being most effective. Four-year-olds additionally demonstrated learning effects in a transfer task. These results suggest that young children's communication skills develop best in response to feedback about their own attempts at reference.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Child Study Centre, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. danielle.matthews@manchester.ac.uk
authors.forename: Danielle
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Matthews
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lieven
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary