Development of knowledge about communication: children's evaluations of explicitly ambiguous messages

Kindergartners and second graders evaluated the communicative clarity of brief oral instructions under 3 conditions: (1) unambiguous: referentially unambiguous instructions that the subjects saw a puppet listener correctly carry out; (2) no closure: ambiguous instructions that the puppet explicitly identified as ambiguous and refused to try to carry out; (3) closure: equally ambiguous instructions that the puppet also explicitly identified as ambiguous but nonetheless carried out, confidently asserting that he thought the speaker meant a specific 1 of the 2 equally possible referents. The younger, but not the older, subjects were influenced by the listener's behavior as well as by the speaker's: That is, they rated the closure instructions as clearer than the no-closure instructions, although less clear than the unambiguous ones. These results suggest that the growth of children's knowledge about communication includes the developing awareness that, in communication situations like the above, an ambiguous message is intrinsically unclear and remains a poor message regardless of the listener's response to it.