Categories such as commanding, requesting, and explaining were used to analyze communicative intentions in conversations of 108 children, aged five through nine, during three sets of play activities varying in task specification and leadership role assignment. Results showed that the frequency and variety of communicative intention categories…

Five components of communication competence have been derived from research: affiliation/support, empathy, behavioral flexibility, social relaxation, and interaction management. This paper describes these dimensions of communication competence; it then reports on a study in which two college females judged by their peers to be effective…

Little is known about how children gain interpersonal access in settings where adults are not present or are unavailable. This study sought to describe children's strategies for access into and withdrawal from peer interactive episodes in a nursery school. Data were collected from direct observations of two groups of children. One group attended…

A sample of 48 middle and lower class kindergarten and second grade students participated in a study to determine what speech adjustments school-age children made for listeners of different ages. Half the second grade subjects learned about two performance tasks--a board game and constructing columns of colored blocks--from the researcher, after…