The Role of Comparison Activity in the Development of Referential Communication

Abstract

The hypothesis that a significant relation exists between referential communication performance and comparison performance was investigated. A pretest-test design was adopted in which two comparison tasks-a "comprehension task" and a "match to sample task"-were selected for the pretest and other two tasks-different versions of the Krauss and Glucksberg referential communication task-were employed for testing children's communicative effectiveness. One hundred and fifty Italian children ranging in age from 5 years 1 month to 8 years 5 months served as subjects for the pretest. Sixty-four children, equally divided into four groups (young-low, young-high, old-low, oldhigh) on the basis of both age and the comparison performance level achieved in the pretest tests, were tested on the two versions of the Krauss and Glucksberg task. As expected, the results indicated that the ability to compare in non-communicative tasks was significantly related to communication effectiveness in referential tasks. In particular, younger children classified as high on comparison skills consistently exhibited communicative performances similar to those of older children classified as low on comparison skills.