The Role of Language Skills in Referential Communication

The ability to communicate referent-nonreferent distinctions is often equated with diminishing childhood egocentrism. It is possible, however, that language skills, eg, vocabulary, are an important, albeit neglected factor in determining the performance of children on referential communication tasks. Ten pairs of children aged 12 participated in an experiment where they performed a referential communication task: the speaker was to describe a set of pictures so that the listener could identify them. Each pair performed the task twice, once in English (their mother tongue), & once in Hebrew (a second lang). Results indicated that restricting children to a language that they control only with some difficulty increases their tendency to use the same words in reference to more than one object, & generally cripples their referential communication performance. This supports the contention that the ability to communicate referent-nonreferent distinctions is not unrelated to language skills. AA