A referential communication task of abstract figures was performed by 64 third- and fifth-grade speakers, who produced messages for an imaginary listener. The results revealed that 8-year-olds produced twice as many ambiguous messages as 10-year-olds, and that the mean length of message was twice as abbreviated in third than fifth graders. It is concluded that 8-year-olds use speech that is less adapted to an unknown decoder than 10-year-olds (who also produced some ambiguous messages). The roles of breakdown of egocentric speech and task difficulty are discussed.
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