Three-year-olds hide their communicative intentions in appropriate contexts.
Abstract
Human cooperative communication involves both an informative intention that the recipient
understands the content of the signal and also a (Gricean) communicative intention
that the recipient recognizes that the speaker has an informative intention. The degree
to which children understand this 2-layered nature of communication is the subject
of some debate. One phenomenon that would seem to constitute clear evidence of such
understanding is hidden authorship, in which informative acts are produced but with
the communicative intent behind them intentionally hidden. In this study, 3- and 5-year-old
children were told that an adult was seeking a toy but wanted to find it on her own.
Children of both ages often did something to make the toy easier for the adult to
see while at the same time concealing their actions in some way. This suggests that
by the age of 3, children are able to separate the multiple layers of intentionality
involved in human cooperative communication.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Age FactorsChild Behavior
Child, Preschool
Communication
Female
Humans
Intention
Male
Multivariate Analysis
Neuropsychological Tests
Problem Solving
Reproducibility of Results
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13647Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1037/a0032017Publication Info
Grosse, Gerlind; Scott-Phillips, Thomas C; & Tomasello, Michael (2013). Three-year-olds hide their communicative intentions in appropriate contexts. Dev Psychol, 49(11). pp. 2095-2101. 10.1037/a0032017. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13647.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Michael Tomasello
James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor
Major research interests in processes of social cognition, social learning, cooperation,
and communication from developmental, comparative, and cultural perspectives. Current
theoretical focus on processes of shared intentionality. Empirical research mainly
with human children from 1 to 4 years of age and great apes.

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