Effect of Script Knowledge on Preschool Children's ... - PsycNET

Developmental Psychology 1990, Vol. 26, No. 2,227-233

Copyright 1990 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/90/$00.75

Effect of Script Knowledge on Preschool Children's Communicative Interactions Laurie N. Furman and Tedra A. Walden

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Vanderbilt University This study investigated the effect of preschool children's event knowledge on communicating with a peer during dyadic play interactions. 30 children were paired with a same-sex peer, matched for script knowledge about 2 events, 1 for which they had and 1 for which they had not demonstrated individual event knowledge. Communicative effectiveness in each condition was assessed in 4 areas: adherence to topic, responsiveness, complexity, and ability to sustain interaction. Interactions in situations for which children had greater script knowledge were characterized by fewer topical violations, more interactive turns, and fewer communicative failures. The effect of script knowledge interacted with age; increased script knowledge sustained interactions of younger, but not older children and decreased the frequency of communicative failures for older children. Results indicate that specific event knowledge facilitates communication in early peer interactions, with specific facilitative effects varying with children's developmental level.

The importance of previously acquired knowledge for understanding and dealing competently with events has been demonstrated repeatedly. Experts in a variety of task domains have been shown to be better able to recall information, notice and recall patterns, and generate hypotheses and problem solutions; also, they are better able than novices to comprehend, understand, and communicate domain-relevant information (see Bransford, Sherwood, Vye, & Rieser, 1986 for a review). A great deal of previously acquired knowledge is derived from social events. Some of this knowledge consists of systems of expectations about familiar, routine events. Schank and Abelson (1977) called mental representations of routine events scripts, which are ordered sequences of actions appropriate to a spatial-temporal context and organized around a goal. Scripts provide a framework of shared knowledge between individuals about routine situations or interactions. They are hypothesized to organize and filter incoming information by providing a set of guidelines for processing information without constantly attending to on-going details. Scripts can enable individuals to make inferences about unstated events and establish rules and goals to help maintain communicative exchanges. Individuals who are familiar with events are better able to generate component actions and may know more about individuals' roles and common items used in such events than individuals who are less familiar with these scripts (Chi & Glaser, 1985; Nelson, 1981;

This article is based on a master's thesis submitted to the Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, by Laurie N. Furman, under the direction of Tedra A. Walden. We are grateful to Len Abbeduto for his advice in designing the study and to Dan Rosenthal for his assistance in preparation of materials and for reliability checks. We appreciate the cooperation of the children and teachers who participated. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tedra A. Walden, Box 512 GPC, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203. 227

Schank & Abelson, 1977). Familiarity with scripts may also enable individuals to use script knowledge to guide their performance (Bransford et al., 1982). Scripts have been hypothesized to be particularly important in early development because they are believed to develop relatively early in life and may serve as one basis for the formation of relatively more abstract and complicated representations (Bretherton, 1985; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). Event knowledge may provide children with strategies for dealing with communicative interactions, an area in which children are said to function poorly (Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968; Glucksberg, Krauss, & Higgins, 1975; cf. Maratsos, 1973; Menig-Peterson, 1975; Shatz & Gelman, 1973). Event knowledge can determine what is expressed, as opposed to what is left to inference, as well as establish particular semantic and syntactic links between utterances. When real world knowledge is lacking, children may have difficulty dealing with communicative situations, because in order to sustain dialogue participants must assume a shared topic and context within which dialogue is structured (Nelson, 1978, 1986; Nelson & Gruendel, 1979; Nelson & Seidman, 1984). Shared context can derive from at least two sources, aspects of the immediate situation and background knowledge about the topic of conversation (Nelson & Seidman, 1984). To account for the potential of event knowledge to promote play-related discourse, it is necessary that the scripts be shared by both partners (Nelson & Seidman, 1984). Nelson and Gruendel (1979) reported that preschool children engage in true dialogue when a shared knowledge base (such as scripts provide) exists. For example, a lunch-time script was hypothesized to account for the demonstration of background knowledge of objects and people in a dialogue between two 4-year-old children. Shared script knowledge was suggested to help structure and maintain dyadic interaction, acknowledge mutual understandings, and resolve misunderstandings. Nelson and Gruendel characterized the dialogue as


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true communication, because it was said to have included turntaking, joint conversation, elaboration, and coordination. Although turn-taking occurred when script knowledge was lacking, children's play and conversation was reported to be undirected, with little agreement as to goals, means, and topic of conversation. Thus, when no shared script exists, speech may be more likely to occur as collective monologue, in which children's utterances are connected to their own rather than their partner's previous utterances. Shared script knowledge may provide a bridge between solitary play and interactive play by providing a context within which each partner can make contributions that are understandable to the other (Nelson & Seidman, 1984). Nelson and Gruendel identified scripts in a post hoc manner and provided only anecdotal support for the hypothesis. No objective measures of the quality of conversation were used. Without such measures, communicative strengths and inadequacies cannot be identified and specified. Furthermore, an interview technique was used to elicit scripts. Bransford et al. (1986) have noted that knowledge is not always accessible and must sometimes be actively prompted; thus, a more sensitive alternative might allow children to enact scripts verbally and nonverbally using props. Nelson and Seidman (1984) explored the role of conversational context in fantasy play in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old dyads. They compared the longest and shortest conversational episodes in the play of three dyads who ranged from 49 to 58 months of age. Longer episodes were reported to invoke a common script as the basis for interactions, whereas the shorter episodes (which consisted primarily of requests for materials) did not. Play within longer episodes was reported to be more coherent. In a second study,five3-year-old andfive4-year-old dyads were observed during 12 min of free play. Utterances were categorized as scripted or nonscripted. Conversational episodes categorized as scripted were reported to be expansive and unified, with more repetition and development of play themes. Nelson and Seidman concluded that scripts helped to structure children's play interactions and to maintain a theme throughout conversation. They also suggested that younger children may be more dependent on script knowledge in their interactions, although they reported no evidence to support this conclusion. The present study examined young children's communicative performance as a function of their knowledge of routine events. Knowledge of events was measured individually, and children's conversation was assessed in dyadic free play. Children played with another child who had been matched for equivalent script knowledge about two events, one event that was familiar to both children and one event that was less familiar. Conversation was analyzed to determine the effect of script knowledge on children's definition of roles, establishment of ground rules for conversational exchange, fulfillment of conversational obligations, contribution to the conversational topic, and complexity of speech. Children who were less familiar with the events were expected to deviate from the conversational topic frequently and to produce fewer turns, fewer statements obligating responses from the other, fewer responses to the other, a lower proportion of topically related pairs of turns, and more communicative failures. Furthermore, it was expected that shared script familiarity would influence the interactions of younger children to a greater extent than it would those of

older children. Specifically, shared script familiarity may help to structure and maintain dyadic interactions, resulting in more extensive communication than younger preschoolers would otherwise be able to produce. Older preschool children may be able to draw on their more mature communication and language skills to maintain conversation when knowledge is lacking.

Method Subjects Fifteen dyads composed of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (43 to 65 months of age) participated: eleven 3-year-olds (M age = 46 months), fifteen 4-year-olds (Mage = 54.2 months), and four 5-year-olds (Mage = 62.8 months). Of the 30 children, 21 were White and 9 were Black. The 16 girls and 14 boys were selected from among 60 children whose script knowledge was assessed. Children were selected from child care centers in Nashville, Tennessee. Geographic regions served by the participating preschools ranged from lower to upper middle class. All of the children were monolingual English speakers. None suffered from speech, hearing, vision, or motor problems, and all appeared to be intellectually normal.

Materials Models (approximately 30 cm X 60 cm X 30 cm) representing each event were constructed of chipboard and cardboard. They accommodatedfiguresapproximately 5-6 cm and contained items that allowed opportunities to elicit script components. For example, a supermarket contained 3-cm X 6-cm shelves to hold "food," a counter and cash register with an operable drawer, shopping carts, a produce scale, grocery bags, and plastic replicas of grocery products.

Selection ofEvents Pilot testing of 10 children was conducted to select two highly familiar and two less familiar situations for the communication task. Two highly familiar events, grocery shopping and eating at McDonalds (in which all the children met the criterion for familiarity), and two less familiar events, an airplane and a train trip (in which 70% and 80% of the children, respectively, met the criterion for less familiar), were selected for the script knowledge and communication tasks.

Elicitation ofScript Knowledge Each child was tested individually in a private room in his or her school. The experimenter and child sat on thefloorfacing one another, with the script model between them and facing the child. Subjects were presented the four scripts in a random order. The experimenter introduced a puppet named Zac, "who is from another planet" and who had no knowledge of events on this planet. The experimenter demonstrated how to describe the events of a birthday party using thefiguresand props. Next, the experimenter presented the child with a model of each event and asked the child if he or she knew about it (e.g., "Do you know what a grocery store is? It's a place where they have food"). The experimenter familiarized the child with the props andfiguresand reminded the child of Zac's lack of knowledge of routine events. The child was instructed to show or tell Zac what one of thefiguresdid in the designated situation. The experimenter, speaking as Zac, intervened only when necessary, so as not to disrupt the child's demonstration. If the child did not enact a script spontaneously, Zac asked the child general questions (e.g., "What happens next?"). After the spontaneous enactment, if some components

SCRIPT KNOWLEDGE were unclear or omitted, the experimenter asked a question specific to the component (e.g., "What does she do when she pays?"). The four scripts were presented in random order in a single videotaped 20-40-min session. A written transcription of each session was prepared containing each child's speech, nonverbal actions (e.g., demonstration with the props), and any inquiries by Zac.


Scoring Each script included six to nine crucial components, that is, necessary actions in a given event. Crucial components form the "core" of the script. Without them, an individual would not be able to perform the entire routine associated with that script. A total of 10 naive adults generated crucial components for each event (see the Appendix). On the basis of the number of crucial components identified in the transcripts, each child was classified as being more or less familiar with each script. The total proportion of crucial components generated spontaneously or with prompting was the basis for assigning the children to more and less familiar script conditions. To be classified as having knowledge of a script, a child had to generate at least 83% of the crucial components. In less familiar scripts, a maximum of 56% of the crucial components were generated. The experimenter's assessment of script familiarity for each event was compared with those of eight naive adults who evaluated transcripts from 4 of the 60 children, aged 36, 41, 51, and 55 months, respectively. Raters were presented with an example of a birthday-party script and a definition of the judgments they were to make. They were instructed to categorize each enactment as representing either lower understanding (knowledge of a few of the crucial components) or higher understanding (knowledge of most of the crucial components). Each rater evaluated 16 transcripts, 4 for each event. Agreement was 80%, with Cohen's kappa of .57 (Cohen, 1960). Kappa values between .50 and .60 are considered to be acceptable (Mitchell, 1979).

Communication Task Each child was paired with a same-age, same-sex classmate who had approximately equal knowledge of each script. The average difference in age between partners was 2.9 months (SD = 2.5 months). Children were also matched in terms of crucial components generated spontaneously and elicited with prompting. For example, in the grocery-store script, a child who demonstrated knowledge of getting a cart, taking food off the shelves, putting the items in the cart, and paying was paired with a child who demonstrated knowledge of those same components. Differences in the proportion of components mentioned in the familiar and less familiar conditions ranged from .33 to .71, with a mean difference of .47, f(29) = 31.33, />< .001. There was no difference between younger and older dyads in the average proportion of spontaneous or prompted components generated in familiar (M = .80 and .85, respectively) and less familiar (M = .56 and .59, respectively) scripts. Each dyad played together once. In one half of the session, both participants were familiar with a particular script, whereas in the other half, both were less familiar with the script, with order varied. The familiar script was the grocery store or the McDonald's event, and the unfamiliar script was one of the two trips. Dyads were given appropriate props, asked to imagine that they were at the script location, and instructed to play together with the toys. The props in the communication task differed from those used in the script knowledge task: They were childsize replicas of adult items (e.g., a toy shopping cart approximately 2 ft [61 cm] tall). Approximately the same number of props were used for each event. In each condition, the children played for 15-20 min. After 15 min if they had lost interest in the task (e.g., asked the experimenter, "When are we going to go back?", lay on thefloor,or no longer talked to each other), the session was terminated. There was a 5-min break between the two sessions.

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Dependent Measures Dependent measures assessed the establishment and maintenance of the topic of interaction, sustenance of interaction, active participation in the exchange, responsiveness in fulfilling conversational obligations, and the conceptual complexity of contributions to the conversational topic. About 3% of total verbalizations were unscored and included unintelligible utterances and statements directed to the experimenter or to oneself. Three measures assessed children's establishment of rules of the game: role-assigning statements (e.g., "You be the storekeeper and I'll be the shopper"), material-assigning statements (e.g., "This cereal is yours; the cookies are mine"), and behavior-constraining statements (e.g., "Since you're the shopper, you can't use the cash register"). These statements reflect knowledge of the roles played by individuals in a given context, behavior that is appropriate and expected in these roles, and materials appropriate to those situations. Proportion of script violations indicated deviations from the topic. For example, in the airplane trip, the statements "I want to eat some ice cream" or "Do you play with Amy and Bobby at school?" are violations. The total number of turns per session indicated the extent to which children could sustain conversation. A turn was defined as continuous talking by one person, followed by the other participant's conversation or by silence. The proportion of turns occurring in adjacency pairs were pairs of speaking turns, one from each participant, in which one individual's utterance was contingent in form and/or content on the other's utterance (Abbeduto & Rosenberg, 1980). The speaker may have obligated the listener to respond or the listener may have responded to nonobligating statements. Examples include question/answer pairs (e.g., "Where are you going?" "To get some milk") or acknowledgment pairs (e.g., "I'm going to push the cart." "Mm-hum"). The proportion of turns in adjacency pairs indicated the extent to which one participant responded to the other. The proportion of obligating turns assessed whether an utterance obligated the other child to respond. Obligating utterances are questions or requests that require the latter to respond by answering or performing the requested action. For example, "Give me the french fries" and "How much does it cost?" are obligating, whereas "That's the plane" or "You can't touch the book" are nonobligating. The proportion of communicative failures was the frequency with which one participant failed to fulfill conversational obligations (e.g., One child said, "Is this yours?" and there was no response from the other child; Abbeduto & Rosenberg, 1980). The quality of contribution to topic was assessed using the average conceptual complexity score of each participant's contributions, employing an adaptation of a system developed by Blank and Franklin (1980). Complexity refers to the extent to which children verbalize their experiences, understand relations between individuals and objects, organize information, and reason about experiences. Each utterance was assigned to one of four levels. Level 1 utterances were the least complex and involved matching an experience. That is, an utterance at this level described salient perceptual experiences. Examples include identifying objects by sound, sight, or touch (e.g., "It's a train"); requesting attention (e.g., "Look at that"); or labeling actions or events (e.g., "The doll is eating"). Also assigned to this level were utterances commonly used in routine social situations (e.g., hi, bye, and thank you). Utterances at Level 2 involved a selective analysis of experience; that is, they imposed unity or definition onto elements in a situation. Included here were utterances noting possession (e.g., "That's my truck"), location (e.g., "It's in the cart"), or the function of objects (e.g., "We can use this to paint with"). Also included at Level 2 were utterances depicting relations between two or more objects or between a person

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LAURIE N. FURMAN AND TEDRA A. WALDEN Table 1 Correlations Among Interaction Variables Variable


1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

1

Turns Complexity Failures Adjacency pairs Obligated responses Nonobligated responses Violations Rules

—

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

.23 —

-.54* -.48*

.54* .32 -.52* —

-.24 .03 .27 .02

.15 -.26 .02 .11 .10 —

.05 -.50* .27 -.23 .05 .39

.33 .45 -.28 .51* -.12 -.22 .06 —

and two or more objects or people (e.g., "I put the money in the bag" or "Let's look at the letters"). Utterances at Level 3 involved reordering experiences; that is, the speaker imposed structure and order on information. Included were utterances that referred to the sequencing of events and materials (e.g., "\fou pay before you leave"), metalinguistic abilities (e.g., "I know what pay means; it means you give some money"), or descriptions of social situations ("It's impolite to talk with your mouth full"). Level 4 utterances were the most conceptually complex and involved reasoning about experience. The speaker talked about relations between events. These include utterances in which causes of an event were identified (e.g., "The blocks fell down because the toy on top was too big"), a decision was justified (e.g., "You can't put the box of books there because it will break the stool"), or solutions formulated (e.g., "If you add more water, we'll have enough"). The speaker of a Level 4 utterance goes beyond direct perception and discerns relationships among objects and events or explains reasons for and/or logic underlying these relationships. Interrater reliability was assessed on transcripts of communication sessions of two dyads. One dyad of boys, with a mean age of 56 months, had enacted the McDonald's and the train scripts. A second dyad of girls, with a mean age of 47 months, had enacted the airport and the grocery-store scripts. The total number of utterances agreed on was divided by total number of utterances for the two scripts combined. Reliability for each measure was between .91 and .99.

Table 2 Means and Standard Deviations ofCommunication Measures in Familiar and Less Familiar Script Interactions Familiar

Less familiar

Measure

M

SD

M

SD

Number of turns Complexity Proportion of violations Proportion of turns in adjacency pairs Proportion of communicative failures Proportion of obligating turns Proportion of nonobligating turns responded to Proportion of rule-defining statements

137.0 1.8 .08

57.2 .17 .06

112.1* 1.8 .27*

65.1 .17 .17

.44

.16

.50

.12

.16 .43

.08 .12

.24 .34

.19 .10

.05

.04

.10

.18

.04

.04

.01

.02

Analyses Frequencies of occurrence of each measure, except total number of turns, were converted to proportions of total utterances. Because of the dyadic nature of the communication session, the dyad was used as the unit of analysis; thus, there were 15 observations. Data were analyzed in multivariate analyses of covariance, taking a multivariate approach to the analysis of the repeated measure, script familiarity. Age was treated as a continuous variable (mean age of each dyad). Thus, both age and script knowledge were used to predict each measure of communicative competence (Cohen & Cohen, 1983).1

Results Preliminary analyses investigated effects of order of the enactment of script conditions and sex of dyad on communication in more and less familiar script conditions. No main effects or interactions were obtained on any measure; thus, subsequent analyses collapsed across these factors. Correlations among measures are in Table 1. Two measures focused on children's adherence to a conversational topic—script violations and establishment of rules for game playing. Fewer script violations were observed in the familiar than in the unfamiliar script condition, F( 1,13) = 17.83, p < .001 (see Table 2). This supports the inference that children in the familiar script interactions did have more extensive topical knowledge and used that knowledge to adhere to conversational topics in free play with peers. The second measure of topical adherence, proportion of rules statements, was observed infrequently, thus, the three types of rules statements were summed for analysis. No effects of script, age, or Age X Script interaction were obtained on establishment of rules of the game; however, even the summed totals were relatively low in frequency. The ability to establish and sustain interaction was indexed by the total number of turns that occurred during the course of each play session. Significant effects of script condition, F\l, 13) = 8.36, p < .02, and a marginal effect of age, F(\, 13) = 1.98, p < .07, were qualified by an Age X Script condition interaction, .FT( 1,13) = 7.08, p < .02. Children produced more turns 1

• Script conditions were different at p < .05.

This technique tests the equality of the within-cell regressions predicting communication measures from age within the less and the more familiar script conditions.

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SCRIPT KNOWLEDGE 200

T

Less Familiar Script

ISOMore Familiar Script

10050-

40

45

50

55

60

65

70


Age of Dyad in Months (Mean Age of Partner*)

Figure 1. Number of interactive turns as a function of age in familiar and unfamiliar script interactions.

in the familiar than in the unfamiliar script condition. The interaction resulted from differential effects of age in the more and less familiar script conditions. In the more familiar script condition, age did not predict number of interactive turns (r = .02, ns; slope of within cell regression = .18, ns). In the less familiar script condition, number of interactive turns was a function of age (r = .48, p < .04; slope of within cell regression = 5.29, p < .07; see Figure 1). These results indicate that when specific script knowledge was available the relationship between age and number of interactive turns was eliminated. Communicative responsiveness was indexed by four variables: proportions of obligating communications, communicative failures, turns in adjacency pairs, and responses to nonobligating communications. Communicative failures were a function of script condition, F{\, 13) = 4.05, p < .07, which was qualified by an Age X Script interaction, F(l, 13) = 4.86, p < .05. More communicative failures were observed in the less than in the more familiar script interactions, but only for older children (see Figure 2). That is, familiarity of script did not influence the likelihood of communicative failures for the younger children, but did do so for older children (r age with failures = -.65; slope of regression in familiar scripts = -.008, p < .01; and r = .33, slope = .01, ns in less familiar scripts). Proportion of turns occurring in adjacency pairs showed a linear increase as a function of age, F(l, 13) = 6.12, p < .03, but no effect of script condition. Neither was the Age X Script condition significant, F{\, 13) = 2.74, p < .13. However, the relationship between age and number of turns occurring in adjacency pairs was significant in the unfamiliar scripts (r = .70, p < .01), but not in the familiar scripts (r-.16, ns). Proportions of obligating communications and responses to nonobligating communications showed no effects of age or script condition. No effects of age or script condition were found to influence the level of complexity of children's conversation. Complexity scores were fairly low in both more and less familiar script interactions and showed little variability (Af = 1.8, in both).

between preschool children. Other aspects of communicative interaction were not influenced by script familiarity. In addition, the effect of script familiarity on specific interactional outcomes varied with age. Interactions within the context of more familiar scripts were sustained over a greater number of interactive turns. However, script knowledge facilitated turn-taking only for younger children, whereas older preschool children sustained relatively high numbers of interactive turns, regardless of their specific event knowledge. Thus, for younger preschool children, event knowledge resulted in more extensive communication than they were able to produce otherwise. Thisfindingsupports the conclusion that scripts can facilitate interaction, allowing young participants to play and converse interactively for an extended period (Nelson & Seidman, 1984). The failure of event knowledge to augment interactive turns of older children may have reflected their ability to draw upon more fully developed general communication, language, and social skills to sustain interaction when knowledge of specific events was lacking. Older preschool children had fewer communicative failures when they interacted in situations for which they had shown well-articulated script knowledge. Although unscripted interactions did not produce fewer communications that initiated obligating sequences, children were less effective in responding to these communications when initiated by their partners. These results may indicate that children's ability to initiate questions, requests, and demands is less affected by event knowledge than is the ability to respond to them appropriately. That this was the case only for older children may reflect the fact that our measure of communicative failure did not take into account the appropriateness of the response, \ounger children may respond to obligating statements with a higher proportion of inappropriate responses. Older children may be more sensitive to the appropriateness of their responses. Therefore, they allow more questions and demands to go unanswered when they lack an appropriate response in unfamiliar script interactions; also, they draw on their script knowledge to produce more responses to conversational obligations when that knowledge is present. Ourfindingof a higher number of topically related adjacent turns with increasing age is consistent with this hypothesis.

0.5 Lass Familiar Script

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 40

- ^. ^

45

50

55

60

More Familiar Script

65

70

Discussion

Age of Dyad in Months (Mean Age of Partners)

Results of the present study demonstrate that specific event knowledge influenced some aspects of dyadic communication

Figure 2. Number of communicative failures as a function of age in familiar and unfamiliar script interactions.


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LAURIE N. FURMAN AND TEDRA A. WALDEN

Frequency of topically related adjacent turns is probably the best measure of each child's responsivity to the topic of conversation of the other. Although proportion of turns in adjacency pairs was influenced by age, it did not vary with script familiarity. This raises the possibility that the influence of shared knowledge of the play script on children's interactions in the present study may have resulted from each child's ability separately to produce relevant behavior and conversation during play, rather than from increased responsivity to each other. Not even the young preschool children in the present study were totally ineffective, egocentric communicators. Children sustained topics of conversation over a substantial number of turns, showed relatively fewer violations and communication failures than might have been expected of inexpert communicators, and were quite often responsive to the conversation of their partners, even when they interacted in a context for which they had displayed little script knowledge. One possible contribution to the relatively effective communication observed in this study was the fact that children had appropriate props available during the communication task. Nelson and Seidman (1984) noted that shared context can derive from at least two sources—welldefined scripts, which provide background knowledge of a topic, and the immediate situation, which includes objects and people present. Both of these may facilitate conversation. The presence of topic-relevant objects may have provided enough shared context for these preschool children to communicate with their partners relatively effectively. Supporting this hypothesis arefindingsthat only one of four measures of responsivity (communicative failures) was superior in the familiar script condition. The best measure of responsivity, adjacency pairs, was a function only of age. Thus, children's conversational effectiveness in the present study may have been the result of children responding often and appropriately to aspects of the situation (objects present), rather than specifically to the conversation of the other. Untangling the relative contributions of event knowledge and situational context to children's interactions is a job for future work. For example, investigating children's ability to play out events with major props missing, thus testing their ability to fill in the blanks with their script knowledge, may illuminate the role of props in facilitating interaction. The complexity of the ideas expressed in children's communications was expected to vary with their level of event knowledge. Other work has suggested that world knowledge may allow children to engage in more sophisticated cognitive processing than might be possible when world knowledge is lacking (Bransford et al., 1986; Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983). Results of the present study do not support this conclusion. However, complexity scores were low and had little variability in the present sample. Thus, the measure of complexity used may have been insensitive to subtle differences in communicative complexity for children in the age range studied. Two conservative decisions resulted in low power in detecting differences between the more and less familiar script conditions in the present study. First, the procedure for matching children who had nearly identical knowledge of script components ensured that children shared a common script, but it resulted in the exclusion of one half of the children whose event knowledge was assessed; thus, a relatively low number of participants were actually included in the interactions. Second, because of the dy-

adic nature of the play interactions, each child's conversation was not independent of the conversation of the partner. Thus, data analyses treated dyads as the unit of analysis, reducing degrees of freedom in testing effects. Although these two features strengthen the study, only extremely large effects were identified at conventional levels of statistical significance. Thus, areas of children's conversation that were unaffected by event knowledge in the present study may be identified as responsive to script knowledge in more powerful tests. Before nonsignificant results in the present study are viewed with confidence, a more powerful replication is necessary. An important caveat to the present results stems from our method of assessing level of script knowledge. The present study assessed only spontaneous and prompted knowledge of specific components of scripts. We did not consider knowledge of temporal or causal order of the components or other factors that may have represented more rigorous definitions of event knowledge. Thus, our familiar scripts may not have been classified as familiar using more rigorous criteria. Thesefindingssuggest that event knowledge is one factor that may contribute to the development of effective communication. However,findingsof the present study also suggest that conversation is not unilaterally facilitated by specific event knowledge; although some aspects of dialogue were superior in familiar script interactions, others were not. Furthermore, the nature of the facilitating effect of script knowledge on interaction and communication changed with age. At younger ages, script knowledge facilitated simple turn-taking. At older ages, turntaking was relatively high in both conditions; however, communicative failures were reduced when children possessed well-articulated script knowledge. A focus on specific aspects of conversation that are and are not facilitated by particular kinds of script knowledge in children of differing developmental levels may advance our knowledge of the processes that underlie the contribution of event knowledge to effective communication and interaction.

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SCRIPT KNOWLEDGE Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scale. Educational Psychology Measures, 20, 37-40. Cohen, J., & Cohen, D. (1983). Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum. Flavell, J. H., Botkin, P. X, Fry, C. L., Wright, J. W, & Jarvis, P. E. (1968). The development of role-taking and communication skills in children. New York: Wiley. Glucksberg, S., Krauss, R. M., & Higgins, E. T. (1975). The development of communication skills in children. In F. Horowitz (Ed.), Review of child development research (Vol. 4, pp. 305-345). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. In I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), Growing points of attachment theory and research. Monographs ofthe Societyfor Research in Child Development, 50, 3-35. Maratsos, M. P. (1973). Nonegocentric communication abilities in preschool children. Child Development, 44, 697-700. Menig-Peterson, C. L. (1975). The modification of communicative behavior in preschool-age children as a function of the listener's perspective. Child Development, 53, 267-273.

Mitchell, S. (1979). Interobserver agreement reliability and generalizability of data collected in observational studies. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 376-390. Nelson, K. (1978). How children represent knowledge of their work! in and out of language: A preliminary report In R. S. Siegler (Ed.), Children's thinking: What develops?(pp. 255-273). Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum. Nelson, K. (1981). Social cognition in a script framework. In J. Flavell & L. Ross (Eds.), Social cognitive development: Frontiers and possible futures (pp. 97-118). New "York: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, K. (1986). Event knowledge: Structure andfunction in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum. Nelson, K., & Gruendel, J. M. (1979). At morning it's lunchtime: A scriptal view of children's dialogues. Discourse Process, 2, 73-94. Nelson, K., & Seidman, S. (1984). Playing with scripts. In I. Bretherton (Ed.), Symbolic play: The development of social understanding (pp. 45-71). New York: Academic Press. Schank, R. C, & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts. Plans, goals, and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum. Shatz, M, & Gelman, R. (1973). The development of communication skills: Modifications in the speech of young children as a function of listener. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38, 1-37.

Appendix Crucial Components ofEach Script and Proportions of Adults Who Mentioned Each Component Grocery store Get cart Get food Put food in cart Check out Clerkringsup food Pay Put food in bags M SD McDonald's Go to counter Order meal Get food Pay Sit Eat/take home and eat a meal M SD

% .90 .90 .80 .70 1.00 1.00 .80 .87 .11

.90 .90 .70 1.00 .90 .80 .87 .10

Component Train station Purchase ticket Check schedule Sit down and wait Board train Sit down Train leaves Train stops/get off

1.00 5.0 5.0 1.00 .80 .70 .80

M SD

.76 .21

Airport Check-in Walk through metal detectors Walk to gate Give attendant ticket/board plane Buckle seat belt Plane takes off Plane lands Get off plane M SD

%

1.00 .50 1.00 1.00 .90 .90 .70 .70 .86 .18

Received October 10,1988 Revision received March 22,1989 Accepted August 2,1989