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Children's judgements of the functional acceptability of referential communications in discourse contexts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Brian P. Ackerman
Brian P. Ackerman
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Abstract

This study determined whether young children are sensitive to the contextual influence of previous discourse on judgements of the adequacy of referential communications. Four- and six-year-old children were read short stories containing terminal referential communications that were either ambiguous or informative relative to a perceptual display of candidate-referential objects. Contextual information was given in the story prior to the terminal communication that was irrelevant to the ambiguous communications or that made these communications functionally informative. The subjects were required to say whether the listener in the story could identify one unique referent. The results showed that the judgements of both groups of children were sensitive to the discourse context of the communications. The children discriminated between the functionally informative and ambiguous communications.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , February 1983 , pp. 151 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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Footnotes

[*]

I thank the children and staff of Kemblesville Elementary School, Kemblesville, Pennsylvania. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19711.

References

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