Children's conceptions of meaning-message relationships

We report three investigations designed to examine children's conceptions of relationships between the speaker's intended meaning and the message used to convey that meaning to a listener. In each investigation, five to seven year olds made judgments of the quality of ambiguous messages. We took correct identification of ambiguous messages to be a sign that the child conceived of messages as “clues” to intended meanings, clues which might be an ambiguous representation of the speaker's intended meaning. In each investigation children were also given a second task. In Investigation 1 the task assessed children's explicit knowledge that verbal messages convey the speaker's intended meaning. In the second investigation the task assessed whether children distinguished between representations which are used to convey an intended meaning and representations which are not. In the third investigation the task assessed whether children could infer from observing a message being given, that the speaker's meaning was conveyed to the listener.The overall aim was to find out whether children who apparently failed to construe messages as clues to intended meanings would nevertheless reveal understanding of other aspects of meaning-message relationships. This proved to be the case in the first and third investigations. The results are discussed in terms of children's conceptions of meaning-message relationships.