The Development of Communication: Competence as a Function of Age

2 experiments are reported. In the first, pairs of children in kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grades played a communication game which required that they develop names to refer to unique graphic figures. In the second experiment, names which had been provided by Ss in Experiment I were given to adult Ss, who were asked to match the names to the figures which initially had elicited them. In Experiment I, all groups began at roughly the same level of communication accuracy, but the older Ss showed a rapid decrease in the number of errors over repetitive trials, while kindergartners' performance showed no improvement. In experiment II, the accuracy of adult Ss varied as a positive function of the age of the child who had provided the name. None of several lexical indexes applied to the names was related to the accuracy with which the name was responded to, irrespective of the speaker's age.