Children' conceptions of relations between messages, meanings and reality

Abstract

The paper is in six sections. In the first, we summarize interpretations of the results of laboratory investigations in which children give or receive information about a particular object or event in the real world. In these studies there is assumed to be a match between the speaker' intended meaning (an internal representation) and the intended referent in the outside world, and it appears that 5–6‐year‐old children are often oblivious to the importance of a one‐to‐one relationship between meaning/referent and message. In the second section we offer a description to account for this: young children may treat the meaning of a message as being the intended outcome rather than the speaker' internal representation, and treat the message within its social context as being unproblematic, rather than as a clue from which it may or may not be possible to infer the intended meaning. In the third section we argue that experience of explicitly educational settings may be responsible for their achieving a conception of messages as being clues to internal representations, clues which may be inadequate. However, in the fourth section we show that there is little direct evidence concerning children' conceptions of meaning as internal representation. In the fifth section we show that children of this age appear to be able to handle relationships between internal representations and the real world when these are a straightforward match or mismatch, but they may not be able to do so in more complex cases such as those involving a slight mismatch. They may have equivalent difficulties with relationships between verbal messages and the internal representations which these express. In the final section we raise possible research issues for the future.