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This article focuses on the child's acquisition of conversational competence; in particular, exploring what conversational abilities the child acquires in early interactions with his/her primary caretaker, the mother. It is suggested that the child develops in four distinct areas of competence: first, children begin to understand the value of communication; second, children develop their ability to communicate using conventional signs; third, children develop an appreciation of the requirements of dialogue; and finally, children develop particular communicative styles as a function of interactional opportunities the mother provides. Mothers facilitate their children's communicative development through interpreting their children's statements, modeling appropriate communicative behavior, extending their children's responses, providing opportunities for interaction and finally, demonstrating positive attitudes toward communication.

Using Tough's hierarchical analysis of language functions, uses, and strategies, this study found developmental differences in the communicative functions and strategies used by preschoolers in their conversations with one another. At three, the most important communicative functions were to verbally master information about the environment (interpretative function) and to express one's needs and ideas (relational function). Interpretative strategies included labelling and elaboration of detail, which enabled children to explore their environment through verbal means. Relational strategies reflected the child's egocentrism since 75% of those strategies were self-emphasizing strategies. At four, a major developmental shift occurred, with the projective function becoming most important, followed by the relational function. Within the projective function, imaginating strategies enabled children to create new roles and contexts for their play. Both imaginating and relational strategies incorporated increasingly adaptive communication directed toward others. Generally it was found that females appeared to develop language strategies (utilized by both sexes) earlier than males, and achieved a more advanced level of cognitive complexity and communicative adaptability in their relational and projective strategies.

The present study investigated preschoolers' use of verbal compliance‐gaining strategies in naturally occurring conflicts with peers. It was found that the older the child, the more complex and adaptive compliance‐gaining became. The growing adaptiveness of their compliance‐gaining strategies reflected their awareness of their opponent's need for information, and their awareness of the communicative demands of conflict situations. With increasing age, children's conflict episodes also became more complex. Conflicts among twos were brief episodes in which physical force and nonword vocal signals predominated. By five, children's conflict episodes consisted of sustained discourse focusing on a triggering event and several side issues. Coalitions developed during disputes and children collaborated in pursuing common aims.

Through an analysis of a feedback session among members of a small task-oriented group, the multifaceted nature of feedback was explored. Dynamism, trust, clarity, mood, and criticism emerged as important underlying dimensions of peer feedback. Additionally, this study explored the communicator style in giving feedback. Significant communicative differences across group members were found in their manner of giving feedback. Effectiveness of feedback was significantly related to the feedback's dynamism and with a verbally assertive style. This study appears to demonstrate that both feedback content and form influence judgments of feedback effectiveness.

This study investigated the use of cohesive referential ties (personals, demonstratives, and comparatives) to maintain textual coherence in the oral and written stories of young children. Overall, a general pattern of usage of cohesive referential ties was maintained regardless of story condition. Oral stories demonstrated more varied cohesive referential ties than did written stories. With increasing age, subjects used significantly more personals and significantly fewer demonstratives (primarily the). Females demonstrated more advanced use of cohesive referential ties than did males. The implications of these findings for facilitating the development of communicative competence among children are discussed.

(1984). Communication Development in Children. Annals of the International Communication Association: Vol. 8, Communication Yearbook 8, pp. 198-266.

This study examines children's sentence comprehension by determining the relative effect which training sessions involving helpful linguistic and visual‐linguistic contexts have on improving children's ability to comprehend reversible passive sentences. The results suggest that the positive effect which helpful visual contexts have on sentence comprehension is limited to immediate sentence comprehension and that children's ability to comprehend reversible passive sentences is developmental. The results support the position that young children have difficulty comprehending reversible passive sentences because they have not yet mastered the syntactic strategies needed to decode such structures.

Student knowledgeability, a measure of a student's background knowledge and interest in an area of study, was found to significantly influence student ratings of instructors and courses. The higher the level of student knowledge‐ ability, the higher that student rated courses and instructors, regardless of how a particular course/instructor was actually ranked when compared to all other courses/instructors used in the study. This was interpreted as reflecting the highly knowledgeable students’ greater sensitivity to and appreciation of good teaching as well as their ability to minimize the consequences of poor teaching for themselves.

The present study investigates eighth‐graders' summarizations of a scientific article used in their science class. Qualitative differences among students' summaries were found. Generally, the better summaries included significantly more information (in terms of details and key ideas); identified the dominant predicate more completely, and used more different rhetorical structures than did the poorer summaries. The most well‐written essays reflected the text organization of the input essay (i.e., the author's original text). Students appear to be sensitive to the text organization and semantic content of the input essay, and draw upon these structures to construct their summaries. This study also developed and tested a coding scheme which reflected both structure and content of the summaries.