Children's inquiry strategies in referential communication and in the game of twenty questions

Abstract

Young listeners perform poorly on referential communication tasks because they respond to ambiguous messages by guessing rather than by seeking clarification. 2 experiments addressed the ability of 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old listeners to perform competently following training in the skill of asking categorical questions. Training was presented either in the context of a Listener task or a Twenty Questions task. As these tasks require common strategies of information seeking, it was predicted that training in one task context would lead to improved performance on that task and to generalization of skill to the untrained task. The hypothesis was supported, although there were age differences in the effectiveness of training and efficiency of strategy use. The implications of the results for children's developing communication abilities were discussed.