Children's Classification Skills as Predictors of Their Referential Communicative Encodings

Younger and older children's classification skills were assessed, and their classificatory performance was used as a predictor variable in a multiple-linear-regression analysis to determine whether their classificatory skills accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in their performance on referential communication tasks. We tested 10 boys and 10 girls at each of six age levels between 5 and 10 years individually on a vocabulary test, four classification tasks, and six referential communication tasks. Order of task presentations was counterbalanced; reliabilities for all tasks were high. A series of related multiple-regression analyses showed that grade and vocabulary accounted for a significant proportion of the variance on the referential communication tasks; the series also showed a large decrease in the F value for grade and vocabulary when the contribution of the classification variables was partialled out. No evidence for an independent contribution of the classification variables was found.