title: The semantics of secrecy: young children's classification of secret content.
abstract: The authors explored whether young children can distinguish potential secrets from nonsecrets by their content, as can older children, adolescents, and adults. Ninety children, 4, 5, and 6 years old, rated the secrecy of items from an adult-validated list of personal information about an age- and gender-appropriate puppet. Two factors of the children's data corresponded to the adult categories of nonsecrets and secrets, and a third factor corresponded to surprises. All ages rated surprises as significantly more secret than nonsecret items; however, the surprise items contained linguistic cues to secrecy. A tendency to rate nonsecrets as secret decreased with age, but only the 6-year-olds rated secrets other than surprises as significantly more secret than nonsecrets. Thus, children acquire the implicit rules defining secret content from a somewhat later age than that reported for the cognitive or behavioral capacities for secrecy.
authors.affiliation: University of Athens, Greece.
authors.forename: Lida
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Anagnostaki
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.forename: Alison J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Bourchier-Sutton
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D003219:Confidentiality; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D018187:Personal Construct Theory; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult