Young children's understanding of interpretive diversity between different-age listeners

Children's understanding of interpretive diversity was tested by assessing their attributions of knowledge to a mother and a preverbal baby, who both had access to an informative verbal message. In Experiment 1, most children between ages 4 and 8 overattributed knowledge to the preverbal baby after an informative message. Experiments la and 1b demonstrated that overattributions were not due to conflating the speaker's intent to inform with the informativeness of the message, nor were they due to overestimating babies'limited knowledge. In Experiment 2, 6- and 8-year-olds acknowledged interpretive differences between the baby and adult listener if the message was not obviously informative. It is concluded that children do not readily view individual differences as related to interpretive differences, especially in the absence of cues inherent to a message that might suggest that the message has multiple interpretations

Adolescent development · Attribution · Cognitive psychology · Developmental psychology · Diversity (politics · Nonverbal communication · Communication in Education and Healthcare · Psychology · Social and Educational Sciences · Social Psychology

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