The present study was designed to investigate the impact of familiarity and audience age on children's self-presentation in self-drawings of happy, sad and neutral figures. Two hundred children (100 girls and 100 boys) with the average age of 8 years 2 months, ranging from 6 years 3 months to 10 years 1 month, formed two age groups and five…

This study examines children's ability to detect accent-related information in connected speech. British English children aged 5 and 7 years old were asked to discriminate between their home accent from an Irish accent or a French accent in a sentence categorization task. Using a preliminary accent rating task with adult listeners, it was first…

This study aimed to examine when children come to distinguish between the private affairs of an individual and the group's matter in relation to group decision making and whether there are any differences between Japan and England in learning the distinction. In total 217 children aged 8, 11, and 13 years, and undergraduates participated in the…

Analysis of naturalistic data identified features of adult-child talk which occurred frequently at school but rarely at home. One of these features--question sequences intended to elicit an answer--was used in an intervention study and was found to promote young children's understanding of ambiguity in verbal messages. (PCB)

Thirty-six children between 4.4 and 5.4 years of age were assessed for understanding about the role of message ambiguity as a cause of communication failure and for level of performance in verbal referential communication tasks. Results show that training sessions illustrating when and why listeners understood or failed to understand were…

The style of parenting of 100 children (mean age 11 years, 5 months) was established according to Baumrind's typology. Children were asked to indicate what they thought an adult would say to justify a moral rule in five different scenarios. Results indicated that parenting style did not relate to the number of justifications that children thought…

Two studies examined the development of children's knowledge of the situations that provoke emotion. English and Dutch (Study 1) and Nepalese (Study 2) children were presented common emotional terms and asked to describe situations likely to provoke each emotion. In both cases, the determinants suggested by the children indicated that children…

Telling children when and why listeners have or have not understood what a speaker meant is not a very effective way of advancing children's referential skills. If giving such information also modifies children's speaking and/or listening behavior, it is very effective. If the same modifications are produced by other means, consequences are…