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Children's Ability to Make Tentative Interpretations of Ambiguous Messages

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Abstract

Consistent with prior research, 5- and 6-year-old children overestimated their knowledge of the intended referent of ambiguous messages. Yet they correctly revised their interpretations of ambiguous messages in light of contradicting information that followed immediately, while maintaining their initial interpretations of unambiguous messages (Experiment 1). Children of this age were able to integrate information over two successive ambiguous messages to identify the intended referent (Experiment 2). However, unlike 7- and 8-year-olds, they were no more likely to search for further information following ambiguous messages compared with unambiguous ones (Experiment 3). We conclude that although 5- and 6-year-olds' interpretations of ambiguous messages are not tentative at the outset, they can use source monitoring skills to treat them as tentative retrospectively, at least over short time spans.

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    The work reported here was carried out by the first author under the supervision of the second in partial fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and with financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK.

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    Address correspondence and reprint requests to E. J. Robinson, School of Psychology, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected].

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