title: How children aged 2;6 tailor verbal expressions to interlocutor informational needs.
abstract: Although preschoolers are pervasively underinformative in their actual usage of verbal reference, a number of studies have shown that they nonetheless demonstrate sensitivity to listener informational needs, at least when environmental cues to this are obvious. We investigated two issues. The first concerned the types of visual cues to interlocutor informational needs which children aged 2;6 can process whilst producing complex referring expressions. The second was whether performance in experimental tasks related to naturalistic conversational proficiency. We found that 2;6-year-olds used fewer complex expressions when the objects were dissimilar compared to highly similar objects, indicating that they tailor their verbal expressions to the informational needs of another person, even when the cue to the informational need is relatively opaque. We also found a correlation between conversational skills as rated by the parents and the degree to which 2;6-year-olds could learn from feedback to produce complex referring expressions.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology,University of Kent,UK.
authors.forename: Kirsten
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Abbot-Smith
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology,University of Kent,UK.
authors.forename: Erika
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Nurmsoo
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology,University of Kent,UK.
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Croll
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology,University of Kent,UK.
authors.forename: Heather
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ferguson
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology,University of Kent,UK.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Forrester
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D003210:Concept Formation; D003463:Cues; D005246:Feedback; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior