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How children learn to produce appropriate referring expressions in narratives: the role of clarification requests and modeling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

Ana M. CARMIOL ,
Danielle MATTHEWS  and
Odir A. RODRÍGUEZ-VILLAGRA
Ana M. CARMIOL*
Affiliation:
Universidad de Costa Rica
Danielle MATTHEWS
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Odir A. RODRÍGUEZ-VILLAGRA
Affiliation:
Universidad de Costa Rica
*
Address for correspondence: Ana M. Carmiol, Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas, Universidad de Costa Rica, Código Postal 2060, San José, Costa Rica. e-mail: ana.carmiol@ucr.ac.cr
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Abstract

Asking children to clarify themselves promotes their ability to uniquely identify objects in referential communication tasks. However, little is known about whether parents ask preschoolers for clarification during interactions and, if so, how. Study 1 explored how mothers clarify their preschoolers’ ambiguous descriptions of the characters in their narratives, and whether clarification requests affect children's repairs of their ambiguous descriptions. Mothers were found to use different strategies, including signaling misunderstanding and modeling appropriate descriptions. Presence of these different strategies predicted children's ability to provide informative repairs. Study 2 tested the effect of children's experience with signaling misunderstanding and modeling on their ability to uniquely identify the characters of a story on a second narration. Experiencing modeling, but not misunderstandings, positively affected children's provision of appropriate descriptions during second narrations. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of imitation in driving referential development.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , May 2018 , pp. 736 - 752
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

We would to thank the participating mothers and children. We thank Siu-lin Rawlinson and Lina Jiménez for drawing and animating the story books. This research was supported by grants from Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Universidad de Costa Rica (723-A9-305, 723-B2-303) to the first author and from The British Academy of Science (LA100133) to the second and first author.

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