The Effects of Feedback on Referential Communication of Preschool Children

Preschool children were paired in 12 speaker-listener dyads in which the speaker described common, familiar items and the listener attempted to guess their identity. Objects were presented until the listener had successfully guessed five objects and had missed five objects. Suecessfully guessed objects were conspicuously placed in an E-Z box whereas those missed were conspicuously placed in a HARD box. These 10 objects were then presented to the same team for identification once again, with each object being removed from the E-Z or HARD box with appropriate comments about its difficulty offered by the experimenter. Postfeedback, the speakers used longer and more informative descriptions for items that had originally been failed, and shorter, less informative descriptions for those that had been successfully guessed on the first identification trials. The changes in the form of the messages for the success items were somewhat greater than for the failure items, suggesting that children might not have mastered specific strategies for composing maximally useful messages, even when the children were disposed to respond to listener communicative needs.

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