The Development of Communicative and Narrative Skills Among Preschoolers: Lessons From Forensic Interviews About Child Abuse

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1 Child Development, March April 2012, Volume 83, Number 2, Pages The Development of Communicative and Narrative Skills Among Preschoolers: Lessons From Forensic Interviews About Child Abuse Irit Hershkowitz University of Haifa Yael Orbach National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Maryland Michael E. Lamb University of Cambridge Carmit Katz University of Cambridge Dvora Horowitz Child Investigation Unit This study examined age differences in 299 preschoolers responses to investigative interviewers questions exploring the suspected occurrence of child abuse. Analyses focused on the children s tendencies to respond (a) at all, (b) appropriately to the issue raised by the investigator, and (c) informatively, providing previously undisclosed information. Linear developmental trends characterized all types of responding. When the types of prompts were considered, 3- to 4-year-olds responded slightly more informatively to specific (directive) recall prompts than to open-ended prompts whereas children aged 5 and older were more responsive to open-ended recall prompts. The findings suggest that even 3-year-olds can provide information about experienced events when recall processes are activated, although the ability to provide narrative responses to openended recall prompts only becomes reliable later in development. Despite the well-documented difficulties that preschoolers have recollecting and communicating memories of events they have experienced, it is now well established that these young children provide reliable descriptions of past events, including distressing events, when properly interviewed (Lamb, Hershkowitz, Orbach, & Esplin, 2008; Peterson, 2002, 2009). Researchers have also shown that very young children, like older children, perform best when emphasis is placed on free-recall retrieval strategies, which are most likely to elicit accurate information, and when children are able to benefit from complementary supportive strategies, including rapport building and cueing (see Pipe, Lamb, Orbach, & Esplin, 2004, for a review). The present study was designed to explore in greater detail the ability of young (3- to 6-year-old) children to respond informatively to various questions Conflict of interest: None. Ethical approval: provided by the University of Haifa IRB. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Irit Hershkowitz, School of Social Work, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel. Electronic mail may be sent to irith@ research.haifa.ac.il. or prompts used to elicit accounts of salient experiences. In order to be informative witnesses about their experiences, young children must (a) remember what actually happened to them, (b) understand the general demands of the interview context, (c) understand the specific questions addressed to them, and (d) recognize when the two interlocutors are not communicating clearly. Both metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness are still developing when children enter school at the age of 5 years (Flavell, 1981; Markman, 1977, 1979; Saywitz & Wilkinson, 1982), however, so preschoolers cannot engage in comprehension monitoring as well as older children and adults. Their capacities are likely to be further stressed in situations as novel and stressful as forensic interviews, in which they must conduct focused memory searches, under stress, often in response to difficult-to-understand questions all factors associated with diminished comprehension Ó 2011 The Authors Child Development Ó 2011 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved /2012/ DOI: /j x

2 612 Hershkowitz, Lamb, Orbach, Katz, and Horowitz monitoring (e.g., Asher, 1976; Cosgrove & Patterson, 1978; Markman, 1977, 1979; Patterson, Massad, & Cosgrove, 1978). Answering questions is a central component of children s daily communication. Competence involves a myriad of interrelated skills including comprehending the questions, understanding the partner s expectations, searching and retrieving information from memory, and constructing a narrative response. The ability to comprehend questions increases with age (Hudson & Nelson, 1983) while the number of irrelevant or random responses decreases (Marinac & Ozanne, 1999). Relevance theory posits that the ability to comprehend questions involves the integration of contextual information and inference (Noh, 2000; Wilson & Sperber, 2004). Research on the development of pragmatic comprehension shows that children start taking account of their partner s knowledge at the age of 2 (O Neill, 1996), with the ability to interpret questions developing rapidly around 3 4 years of age (Loukusa, Ryder, & Leinonen, 2008) and the ability to use relevant contextual information when answering questions further developing until the age of 6 years (Ryder & Leinonen, 2003; Yliherva, Loukusa, Visanen, Pyper, & Moilanen, 2009). Because pragmatic comprehension requires the integration of information from different sources, researchers such as Baddeley (1996) have argued that it is assisted by other cognitive functions, such as working memory. Inferring a speaker s or questioner s intention seems to be a key skill which develops during the preschool years, with the youngest children comprehending sentences literally and older children gradually making increasingly sophisticated inferences using pragmatic information (Eson & Shapiro, 1982). The growing flexibility of preschoolers comprehension is also reflected in their increasing ability to answer questions about experienced events that are less schematically organized (Loukusa et al., 2008). In order to share their experiences with interlocutors, children must also understand how knowledge is acquired and how much knowledge they are expected to share. A basic understanding of the mind and of the nature of beliefs (i.e., theory of mind) not only helps children form personal memories (Perner & Ruffman, 1995; Welch-Ross, 1997) but also facilitates awareness of others motivation when asking that others share those memories (Kleinknecht & Beike, 2004). Social and cultural factors, not only cognitive and communicative development, also affect developing communicative skills. Children learn to shape their autobiographical memories into storylike narratives from conversations with their parents (Nelson & Fivush, 2004), and through such experiences, their accounts change from simple descriptions of scripts to more detailed and better organized narratives (Reese & Brown, 2000). Their structures not only help encode experiences in memory but can also cue the retrieval of such memories, increasing the amount and quality of information provided in response to memory probes (Haden, Hain, & Fivush, 1997). Because cognitive, metacognitive, and communicative awareness are still developing in the preschool years, it is not surprising that preschoolers provide shorter accounts of their experiences, including stressful or traumatic events, than older children or adults (see Pipe et al., 2004, for a review). Young children also have more difficulty reporting experienced events as time passes (Steward, 1993), causing an additional decrease in the amount of information they provide. Because young children are less dependent than older children on memory retrieval strategies, their free-recall narratives are especially poor (see Pipe et al., 2004, for a review), leading some to suggest that, when interviewing children about past experiences, recognition or option-posing prompts are necessary (Hewitt, 1999; Lyon, 1999) even though such prompts compromise the accuracy of the information retrieved (see Lamb et al., 2008). Research on children s performances in interviews about their experiences shows that their informativeness can be enhanced by both rapport building and narrative training before the target retrieval as well as by various cueing strategies during the memory task (for reviews, see Hershkowitz, in press; Roberts, Brubacher, Powell, & Price, in press) without compromising accuracy (although Roberts, Lamb, & Sternberg, 2004, found that the accuracy of 4- to 6-year-olds responses was adversely affected by some rapport building strategies). Many expert professional groups have since recommended that rapport-building and narrativetraining strategies should be employed during forensic interviews of young suspected victims or witnesses of abuse, and they are thus included in the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol (Lamb et al., 2008). Previous field studies involving investigative interviews conducted using the NICHD Protocol have shown that preschool-aged children are able to provide free-recall accounts of abusive events (Lamb et al., 2003, 2008), casting doubt on

3 Communicative Skills Among Preschoolers 613 assumptions about their limited abilities to describe experienced events without extensive use of recognition memory prompts. For example, Orbach et al. (2000) and Sternberg, Lamb, Orbach, Esplin, and Mitchell (2001) showed that 4- to 6-year-olds did not differ significantly from 7- to 8-year-olds with respect to the average number of details they provided in response to open-ended free-recall prompts and with respect to the total number of forensically relevant details they provided in response to such prompts. Similarly, Lamb et al. (2003) and Sternberg et al. (2001) reported that half of the information provided by the 4- to 6-year-olds in their respective studies was elicited using freerecall prompts, which reduced interviewers reliance on more risky yes no and forced-choice questions. Inspired by such findings, the current study was designed to explore finer age differences in patterns of response to various types of prompt during investigative interviews of preschoolers, including some as young as 3 years of age. Previous research on children s abilities to comprehend and answer questions has focused on conversations and interviews about neutral or positive experiences, and the present study is thus to first the focus on developmental changes in preschoolers linguistic and communicative abilities when describing significant personal, and potentially traumatic, experiences. Because this was a field study, it was not possible to measure the accuracy of the children s responses, so we focused exclusively on communicative and narrative skills. Interviews with a large number (N = 299) of preschool-aged alleged victims were examined closely to determine whether previously described developmental trends in narrative production could be extended downward to characterize the capacities of 3-year-olds. Method Sample Forensic interviews were conducted by 61 child investigators with 299 alleged victims of sexual abuse in all five administrative regions in Israel. The children, all Hebrew speakers, ranged in age from 3 to 6 years, and were divided for purposes of analysis into four age groups, with 46, 98, 96, and 59 children in the respective age groups: years (referred to as 3), years (4), years (5) and years (6). The children were selected for the study because they disclosed sexual (n = 128) or physical (n = 171) abuse during the investigative interviews we studied (i.e., children who did not disclose abuse were not included in the sample). The children claimed that they had been abused on a single (n = 110) or on multiple occasions (n = 189); all the statements were deemed highly credible by the youth investigators. No interviews which met these criteria were excluded. Most suspects were members of the alleged victims families (N = 202), including parents, siblings, or other members of the extended families, although 97 were not family members. All interviews closely followed the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol (Lamb et al., 2008) described below. Permission to perform this study was provided by the Ministry of Labour and Welfare in Israel, subject to strict guarantees regarding the privacy of the victims, suspects, and witnesses involved. The NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol The NICHD Protocol is fully structured, covering all phases of the investigative interview, and was designed to incorporate into investigative practices our understanding of the factors that make it easiest for children to describe their experiences accurately. In the introductory phase, interviewers introduce themselves, clarify the children s task (the need to describe events in detail and to tell the truth), and explain the ground rules and expectations (i.e., that they can and should say I don t remember, I don t know, I don t understand, or correct the interviewers when appropriate). The rapport-building phase comprises two sections. The first is a structured open-ended section designed to create a relaxed, supportive environment for children. In the second section, children are prompted to describe recently experienced neutral but personal events in detail in order to further develop rapport between children and interviewers. In addition to its rapport-building function, this phase of the interview is designed to simulate both the open-ended investigative strategies and techniques used in the substantive phase and the related pattern of interaction between interviewers and children, while demonstrating to children the specific levelofdetailthatwillbeexpected. In a transitional phase between the presubstantive and the substantive parts of the interview, a series of initially open-ended nonsuggestive prompts are used to identify the target event(s) to be investigated. The first prompt asks the child either: Do you know why you came to see me today? or Tell me the reason you came to talk with me today. Interviewers only move on to carefully scripted but more focused nonsuggestive

4 614 Hershkowitz, Lamb, Orbach, Katz, and Horowitz prompts (in sequence) if the children fail to identify the target event(s). Once an allegation is made, the free-recall phase begins with the main invitation ( Tell me everything that happened from the beginning to the end as best you can remember ). Follow up open-ended prompts are then recommended ( Then what happened? Tell me more about that ), as are cued invitations ( Earlier you mentioned a person object action time location, tell me everything about that ) aimed at eliciting uncontaminated accounts of the alleged incident s from fre-recall memory. As soon as the first narrative is completed, interviewers determine whether the incident occurred one time or more than one time and proceed thereafter to secure incident-specific information. Only after the open-ended questioning has been exhausted do interviewers proceed to directive questions (focused questions, mostly in wh- format, addressing details previously mentioned by the child such as What colour was his car? after the child mentioned a car). If crucial details are still missing at the end of the interview, interviewers may ask limited option-posing questions (mostly yes no questions referencing new information that the child failed to address previously such as Did he touch any part of his body when he was talking to you? ). Suggestive prompts which communicate what responses are expected ( At that time he was laying on top of you, wasn t he? ) are strongly discouraged in all phases of the interview. Data Coding Audio-tape recordings of the interviews were transcribed and checked to ensure their completeness and accuracy. Two raters who were blind to the researchers goals and hypotheses then classified the interviewers substantive prompts as openended invitations, directive prompts, option-posing prompts or suggestive prompts as defined in the previous paragraph. Prompts that addressed nonsubstantive issues ( You need to sit still ) and did not address any substantive issues regarding the incident under investigation were categorized as nonsubstantive. Any information provided by the children was also coded. First, the raters tabulated the number of words spoken and the number of details conveyed in each of the children s responses using a technique first developed by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) and elaborated by Lamb et al. (1996). Details were defined as words or phrases identifying or describing individuals, objects, or events (including actions) related to the investigated incident (e.g., He has been mean to me consists of three details). Details were only counted when they were new and added to the understanding of the target incidents. Second, the raters distinguished between verbal responses that specifically addressed the issue raised by the interviewers and included the specific information requested (on-track responses), and verbal responses that did not include the requested information and or did not address the issue raised by the interviewers (off-track responses). Thus, no response, digressive responses, claims of lack of knowledge, lack of memory, lack of understanding, refusals to answer or unintelligible replies due to unclear pronunciation or unfinished replies were considered off-track, as were nonverbal or verbal responses providing substantive information that was not requested. On-track responses that included off-track elements were considered ontrack. Within the category of on-track responses, the raters also distinguished between responses that provided new information (informative responses) and responses that repeated information they had already provided. Before coding transcripts for the study, the raters were trained on an independent set of transcripts until they agreed on the identification of at least 90% of the prompts, responses and details. During the course of coding, 20% of the transcripts were independently coded by both coders to ensure that they remained equally reliable. Further details regarding the coding categories and rules were provided by Lamb et al. (1996) and by Orbach et al. (2000). Results Composition of Questions In the substantive part of the interviews, investigators addressed an average of (SD =47.19) prompts to the children, including (SD = 38.77) substantive and (SD =15.95) nonsubstantive prompts (see Table 1), proportionally representing.83 (SD = 0.09) and.16 (SD = 0.09), respectively, of all prompts. Of the substantive prompts, (SD = 13.89) were invitations; proportionally, these thus represented.33 (SD = 0.12) of the requests for information and.28 (SD =0.11) of all interview prompts. Corresponding figures for directive prompts were (SD =21.74),

5 Communicative Skills Among Preschoolers 615 Table 1 The Relative and Absolute Frequencies With Which Different Prompts Were Addressed to Children of Different Ages Types of prompt Total prompts Invitation Directive Option posing Suggestive Substantive Nonsubstantive Number Rate Number Rate Number Rate Number Rate Number Rate Number Rate Mean Age (13.45).21 (0.08) (23.70).34 (0.09) (9.02).23 (0.11) 3.32 (4.05).03 (0.04) (43.02).83 (0.07) (13.84).16 (0.07) (55.63) (12.37).27 (0.11) (21.66).32 (0.10) (8.15).19 (0.09) 3.18 (3.91).04 (0.04) (37.96).84 (0.08) (10.20).15 (0.08) (45.32) (12.43).31 (0.11) (19.65).34 (0.09) (7.93).14 (0.07) 2.90 (3.44).03 (0.02) (36.41).83 (0.11) (21.77).16 (0.11) (43.24) (16.28) 29 (0.11) (22.41).34 (0.10) (8.11).14 (0.07) 3.49 (3.16).03 (0.03) (38.22).82 (0.08) (13.66).17 (0.08) (46.30) Average (13.89).28 (0.11) (21.74).33 (0.09) (8.35).17 (0.09) 3.18 (3.64).03 (0.03) (38.77).83 (0.09) (15.95).16 (0.09) (47.20) Note. Values in parentheses are standard deviations. Note that the rates of specific prompts were computed in relation to the total number of prompts. proportionally.4 (SD = 0.11) of the substantive and.33 (SD = 0.09) of all prompts. There were (SD = 8.35) option-posing prompts, proportionally comprising.2 (SD = 0.1) of the substantive and.17 (SD = 0.09) of all prompts. On average, there were 3.18 (SD = 3.64) suggestive prompts, proportionally.04 (SD = 0.04) of the requests for information and.03 (SD = 0.03) of all prompts. Note that one child was asked no option-posing questions and that 60 children were asked no suggestive questions. Although these children were included in the analyses of the prompts addressed to children (n =299), they could not be included in analyses of the children s responses to different types of prompts, resulting in a reduced sample for these analyses of 238. A 4 (prompt type, within subject) 4 (age groups, between subject) repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA; n = 299) showed a main effect for age on the total number of questions posed, F(3, 295) = 3.191, p <.024, h p 2 =.031; a main effect for prompt type, F(3, 885) = , p <.001, h p 2 =.523; as well as an interaction F(9, 885) = 5.563, p <.001, h p 2 =.054, between the two factors. A one-way ANOVA test followed by trend analyses and Sheffé post hoc tests (n = 299) revealed both linear (p <.014) and quadratic (p <.028) trends for age on the total number of questions posed to the children. The number of questions asked decreased from age 3 to age 4 and then increased between age 5 and age 6, although the only significant difference was between the numbers for ages 4 and 6 (p <.014). A subsequent exploration using paired t tests of the main effect for prompt type revealed that directive prompts were most frequent, followed by invitations, option-posing questions, and suggestive prompts, with all differences between prompt types significant, p <.001. The nature of the interaction was then explored using one-way ANOVAs followed by trend analyses and Sheffé post hoc tests (n = 299) for each type of prompt. The total number of invitations increased linearly (p <.001) with age: The 3-yearolds were given fewer invitations than either the 5-year-olds (p <.024) or 6-year-olds (p <.001), and the 4-year-olds were given fewer invitations than the 6-year-olds (p <.002). In addition, linear (p <.03) and nonlinear quadratic (p <.029) trends were evident with respect to the number of directive questions posed, with the rate decreasing from the 3- to the 4-year-old groups, then increasing across the older age groups, although the only

6 616 Hershkowitz, Lamb, Orbach, Katz, and Horowitz significant difference was between the 4- and 6-year-olds (p <.036). Age-related changes in the number of option-posing questions involved both linear (p <.005) and quadratic (p <.008) effects, suggesting that their frequency dropped as age increased except with respect to the 6-year-olds; the mean for the 3-year-olds differed significantly from that for the 5-year-olds (p <.006). No age differences were evident with respect to the number of suggestive prompts. Children s Responses The children s responsiveness to the interviewers requests for information was then explored. Measures of the children s behavior following nonsubstantive prompts are thus excluded from the analyses. Interestingly, children of all ages made some response to a remarkably high proportion of the prompts (M = 0.92, SD = 0.10), although they provided on-track responses to the specific requests following a lower proportion of the prompts (M = 0.63, SD = 0.16) and provided new additional forensic information that had not been mentioned earlier following less than half of the prompts (M = 0.46, SD = 0.14). Table 2 displays the proportions (or the rates) of the different responses provided by the children following each type of prompt. One-way ANOVAs revealed linear (p <.01) effects for age on the overall rate of responding, F(3, 295) = 4.36, p <.005, n = 299, with the 5- and 6-year-olds responding more often than the 3-year-olds (p <.011 and p <.033, respectively). There were also significant linear (p <.001) age differences in the proportion of on-track responses, F(3, 295) = 14.72, p <.001, n = 299, with the 5- and 6-year-olds providing on-track responses more often than the 3- (p <.001 for both) and 4-year-olds (p <.001 and p <.004, respectively). Older children also offered more informative responses providing new details, F(3, 295) = 15.10, p <.001, n = 299; the significant linear effect (p <.001) similarly indicated that the 5- and 6-year-olds responded informatively more often than the 3- (p <.001 for both comparisons) and 4-year-olds (p <.001 and p <.008, respectively). No quadratic age trends were evident in any of these analyses of the children s responses. A 4 (prompt type, within subject) 4 (age group, between subject) repeated measures ANOVA (n = 238) confirmed an effect for age on the overall rate of responding, F(3, 234) = 2.753, p < 0.05, h 2 p =.34, and revealed a significant main effect for the type of prompt, F(3, 702) = 7.80, p <.001, Table 2 Age Differences in the Rates at Which Children Made Different Types of Responses to Different Types of Substantive Prompts Rate of responses Rate of responses to the specific request Rate of responses providing new details Invitation Directive Option posing Suggestive Invitation Directive Option posing Suggestive Invitation Directive Option posing Suggestive Age (0.15) 0.91 (0.10) 0.83 (0.19) 0.91 (0.17) 0.43 (0.22) 0.59 (0.19) 0.55 (0.21) 0.65 (0.36) 0.26 (0.18) 0.47 (0.18) 0.44 (0.14) 0.56 (0.39) (0.15) 0.93 (0.10) 0.90 (0.16) 0.89 (0.24) 0.47 (0.21) 0.66 (0.21) 0.65 (0.23) 0.61 (0.37) 0.31 (0.17) 0.53 (0.21) 0.52 (0.23) 0.54 (0.37) (0.09) 0.95 (0.10) 0.92 (0.11) 0.97 (0.07) 0.61 (0.20) 0.73 (0.16) 0.78 (0.16) 0.71 (0.32) 0.44 (0.18) 0.60 (0.16) 0.65 (0.22) 0.55 (0.34) (0.07) 0.96 (0.06) 0.93 (0.12) 0.94 (0.14) 0.62 (0.20) 0.72 (0.19) 0.76 (0.16) 0.68 (0.30) 0.45 (0.20) 0.58 (0.19) 0.62 (0.22) 0.58 (0.30) Average 0.93 (0.12) 0.94 (0.09) 0.90 (0.15) 0.93 (0.17) 0.54 (0.22) 0.68 (0.19) 0.70 (0.21) 0.66 (0.34) 0.37 (0.19) 0.56 (0.19) 0.57 (0.23) 0.55 (0.35) Note. Values are given as mean (standard deviation).

7 Communicative Skills Among Preschoolers 617 g 2 p =.032, as well as an interaction between age and the type of prompt, F(9, 702) = 2.08, p <.05, h 2 p =.026. Paired t tests were used to clarify the main effect for the type of prompt and indicated that invitations, directive and suggestive prompts were equivalently likely to elicit responses but did so more frequently than option-posing prompts (p <.001, p <.001, and p <.014, respectively). The Age Type of Prompt interaction was significant because age effects were evident for option-posing prompts (with 5- and 6-year-olds responding more often than 4-year-olds; p <.006 and p <.012, respectively) and for suggestive prompts (with 5-year-olds responding more often than 4-year-olds, p <.035), but not for invitations and directives. When the focus shifted to on-track responses that were appropriate to the specific requests made, a 4 (prompt type, within subject) 4 (age group, between subject) repeated measures ANOVA (n = 238) confirmed the main effects for age, F(3, 234) = 9.12, p <.001, g 2 p =.105, with on-track responding increasing with age. A main effect for prompt type F(3, 702) = 29.32, p <.001, g 2 p =.111, was explored using paired t tests: Children provided proportionally fewer on-track responses to invitations than to directive, option posing or suggestive prompts (p <.001 for all comparisons) but no other differences were evident. There was no interaction overall, but when only directive and invitations prompts were examined, there was an Age Prompt interaction, F(3, 294) = 4.839, p <.01, g 2 p =.047, with the 3- and 4-year-olds providing more on-track responses to directive prompts than to invitations (p <.001 for both comparisons), whereas this difference was attenuated for the 5- and 6-yearolds although still significant (p <.001 for both comparisons). When only informative responses that provided new forensic details were examined (n = 238), the main effect for age, F(3, 234) = 7.207, p <.001, g 2 p =.085, was confirmed: Informativeness increased with age. There was also a main effect for prompt type, F(3, 702) = , p <.001, g 2 p =.150, with children again being less informative following invitations than following all other prompts: directive, option-posing and suggestive prompts (p <.001 for all). An Age Prompt interaction, F(9, 702) = 1.930, p <.05, g 2 p =.024, suggested that the association between informativeness and age was evident when children responded to open-ended invitations (with 3- and 4-year-olds less informative than 5- and 6-year-olds, p <.001 for all), directive (with 3-year-olds less informative than 5- and 6-year-olds, p <.002 and p <.043) and option-posing prompts (with 3- and 4-year-olds less informative than 5-year olds, p <.001 and p <.001, respectively, and also less informative than the 6- year-olds, p <.001 and p <.044, respectively) but not when they responded to suggestive prompts. Subsequent analyses focused on the average number of details children provided in each response. On average, children provided 1.99 forensic details per response (SD = 1.33; see Table 3); the average numbers of details increased with age, F(3, 295) = 21.22, p <.001, n = 299, with a linear (p <.001) but no quadratic trend. Subsequent Sheffé tests revealed that the 3- and 4-year-olds provided fewer details than the 5- and 6-year-olds (p <.001 for all comparisons). A 4 (prompt type, within subject) 4 (age group, between subject) repeated measures ANOVA (n = 238) confirmed the main effect for age, F(3, 234) = 10.51, p <.001, g p 2 =.119, and revealed a main effect for prompt type, F(3, 702) = , p <.001, g p 2 =.081, as well as an interaction between the two factors, F(9, 702) = 3.716, p <.001, g p 2 =.045. Subsequent paired t tests showed that the average number of forensic details provided in response to invitations was significantly higher than in the average responses to directive (p <.001), optionposing (p <.001), or suggestive (p <.05) prompts. In addition, directive prompts elicited more details than option-posing prompts (p <.001). The Age Prompt interaction suggested that 3- and 4-yearolds differed from 5- and 6-year-olds with respect to the number of details elicited using different types of prompts. Invitations and directive and suggestive prompts elicited similar numbers of details from the 3- and 4-year-olds but were superior to option-posing prompts (p <.24, p <.001 and p <.008, respectively), whereas invitations were superior to all types of prompts: directive (p <.001), Table 3 Age Differences in the Number of Details Provided by Children in Response to Different Types of Substantive Prompts Age Types of prompt Invitation Directive Option posing Suggestive (1.14) 1.43 (0.89) 0.85 (0.42) 1.72 (1.81) (1.36) 1.85 (1.17) 1.10 (0.78) 2.12 (2.64) (2.35) 2.45 (1.49) 1.85 (1.98) 2.17 (2.28) (2.81) 2.34 (1.32) 1.74 (1.16) 2.49 (2.99) Average 2.57 (2.24) 2.07 (1.33) 1.43 (1.37) 2.15 (2.49) Note. Values are given as mean (standard deviation).

8 618 Hershkowitz, Lamb, Orbach, Katz, and Horowitz option-posing (p <.001) and suggestive prompts (p <.005) for the 5- and 6-year-olds, for whom directives were superior to option-posing prompts (p <.005) as well. Other Informative Responses Two other types of informative replies were infrequent: those in which children did not respond to the specific request but nevertheless provided forensically relevant information (M = , SD = 0.019) and those in which information was communicated using nonverbal actions or gestures, rather than verbally (M = 0.036, SD = 0.060). There were no age differences in the occurrence of these two types of responses. Noninformative Responses All responses which involved digressions (M = 0.015, SD = 0.036), claims of lack of knowledge (M = 0.04, SD = 0.05), lack of memory (M = 0.029, SD = 0.056), lack of understanding or requests for clarification (M = 0.043, SD =.046), refusals to answer (M = 0.033, SD = 0.062), unintelligible replies due to unclear pronunciation (M = 0.038, SD = 0.057), unfinished replies (M = 0.016, SD = 0.021), or no answer (M = , SD = 0.114) were then collapsed. A 4 (prompt type, within subject) 4 (age group, between subject) repeated measures ANOVA of noninformative replies (n = 238) revealed a main effect for age, F(3, 234) = 5.932, p <.001, g 2 p =.071; a main effect for prompt type, F(3, 702) = 54.56, p <.001, g 2 p =.189; and an interaction between the two factors, F(9, 702) = 1.996, p <.05, g 2 p =.025. Scheffé post hoc tests revealed that noninformative responses decreased with age: 5- and 6-year-olds provided less informative responses than 3-yearolds (p <.001, p<.009), and 5-year-olds less than 4-year-olds (p <.003). Paired t tests showed that invitations elicited noninformative responses more often than directive, option posing or suggestive prompts did (p <.001 for all comparisons) and that directive and suggestive prompts elicited noninformative responses more often than option-posing prompts did (p <.010, p <.002). An interaction between the two factor, F(9, 702) = 1.996, p <.05, g 2 p =.025, suggested that the decrease with age in noninformative responding was more apparent with respect to invitations than other prompts. Scheffé post hoc tests revealed that 5- and 6-yearolds provided fewer noninformative responses to invitations than 3- (p <.001, p <.01) and 4-yearolds (p <.001, p <.009) did; the numbers of noninformative responses to directive prompts decreased from age 3 to age 5 (p <.01) whereas such responses to option-posing prompts decreased from age 3 to age 5 (p <.003) and 6 (p <.023) and to suggestive prompts from age 4 to age 5 (p <.039). Discussion This study was the first to explore the ability of typically developing children as young as 3 years of age to answer questions and provide relevant information about salient experiences when questioned at length about them. Most previous research by students of communicative or memory development has been constrained by the focus on relatively insignificant events or structured situations which exclude the effects of contextual factors that influence natural communication (Loukusa et al., 2008). The present study thus provided unique information about the abilities, even of quite young children, to answer questions and recount significant amount of information about their experiences in a unique natural context. The results elucidate developmental trends in communicative responsiveness, showing shifts from merely answering questions to providing relevant responses to providing new information not anticipated by the interviewer. Because this was a field study of children describing experiences that the interviewers had not witnessed, it was impossible to assess the accuracy of the information reported. We thus focused on the children s communicative and narrative skills rather than on the accuracy of their statements, although we only included in the study accounts which were deemed highly credible by the forensic investigators who conducted the interviews. The findings make clear that very young children can indeed describe their experiences and are able to answer a substantial number of questions seeking diverse types of information. Children as young as 3 years of age were asked 84 questions on average and replied to almost all of them, indicating that even such young children, far from being egocentric speakers, have the requisite cognitive, verbal, and communicative skills, as well as sufficient attentional capacities, to function as engaged interlocutors with adults. The young children s levels of engagement during the interviews were particularly impressive in light of the widespread

9 Communicative Skills Among Preschoolers 619 claims challenging their capability to perform competently in such contexts, which have in turn meant that many professionals avoid interviewing very young children, even when abuse is suspected and those children may well be the only possible sources of relevant information. Although Lamb et al. (2003) studied forensic interviews of 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds, the average number of questions addressed to children of similar ages in the current study was substantially higher (84 vs. 48), yet even the youngest children remained engaged, cooperative and responsive. Second, analyses of the quality of communication showed that the preschoolers not only complied with the communicative expectations but also seemed to understand and process the requests addressed to them, providing relevant information in response to specific requests. About two thirds of the prompts addressed to the children elicited on-track and thus forensically informative responses. The developmental trend in on-track responding is consistent with Marinac and Ozanne s (1999) report that 3-year-olds often gave random or irrelevant responses, but such responding decreased with age in line with children s growing ability to comprehend pragmatic requests. Although these abilities have been attributed to preschoolers in the past (e.g., Ryder & Leinonen, 2003), the forensic interviews we studied were more cognitively demanding and less familiar, so the children s performance was especially remarkable (Loukusa et al., 2008). Despite the age-related progression in the production of relevant responses, even the oldest children we studied failed to give on-track responses to about 30% of the questions, thereby making it clear that the relevant meta-linguistic and comprehension monitoring skills were, as others have observed (e.g., Flavell, 1981; Letts & Leinonen, 2001), still developing during the late preschool period we studied. Third, the young children provided additional relevant information as the interviews proceeded, with almost half of the prompts yielding totally new details, not previously mentioned by either the children or the interviewers. This finding makes clear that the children were not simply repeating previously mentioned information, but continued to produce new details, adding richness to their narratives. In addition to being cooperative and responsive interviewees, in other words, these young children were involved in extended and fruitful memory retrieval processes, producing an average of two new details per prompt addressed to them. Producing new details in response to tens of questions not only requires extended retrieval skills but also monitoring of the interviewer s response and existing knowledge. As expected, age differences were evident on all measures, with older children providing proportionally more responses, more on-track responses, and absolutely more new details per response. However, the developmental trends evident on these measures were mostly linear, indicating that although informativeness increased with age, children as young as 3 years of age were able to respond informatively. Nevertheless, the 3- and 4-year-olds (those aged between 37 and 54 months) were consistently less capable than the 5- and 6-year-olds (those aged between 65 and 78 months) on every measure, underscoring the communicative and cognitive difficulties that younger children face when coping with the demands of informationgathering interviews. The remarkable development of communicative skills from age 4 to 5 was also reported by Yliherva et al. (2009) who attributed it to improvements in the ability to process contextual information. Examination of the children s responses to various types of prompts provides new insight into children s capabilities as witnesses. Preschoolers in our sample were less responsive and less likely to produce new details in response to open-ended invitations as opposed to closed-ended directive, option posing and suggestive prompts. Such differences were not evident in Lamb et al. (2003) study, probably because their sample included older children, and the data reported here suggest that these differences decreased with age. Closed-ended prompts may have elicited informative responses from preschoolers more effectively in the present study because they make narrow specific requests that therefore demand less retrieval effort; this might suit younger children who employ less effective retrieval strategies than older children unless guided by their interlocutors (Kulkofsky, Wang, & Ceci, 2008; Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998). Researchers have warned, however, that specific prompts may put more pressure on young children to respond, leading them to respond even when they are not confident that their responses are correct, and have shown that children provide less accurate information as prompts get more specific (e.g., Bruck, Ceci, Francouer, & Renick, 1995; Poole & Lindsay, 1998). Importantly, however, these researchers have mainly focused on recognition prompts (corresponding to option-posing and suggestive questions in our study), which

10 620 Hershkowitz, Lamb, Orbach, Katz, and Horowitz introduce potentially contaminating information that has not been mentioned by the children. By contrast, our results shift attention to the advantages of directive wh- questions that involve focused recall rather than recognition processes and have been shown to elicit more accurate information from preschoolers than recognition prompts do (Peterson, Dowden, & Tobin, 1999). Directive prompts, although specific, relate to information mentioned by the children and do not introduce any undisclosed information, thereby avoiding the risk of contamination. By using directive prompts, the interviewers in the current study may have afforded even the youngest children the cues they needed to effectively trigger event recall, helping them provide appropriate and informative responses to the interviewers requests. Interestingly, Lamb et al. (2003) reported that cued invitations were especially useful when interviewing young children, particularly when they involved action cues. In fact, because directive prompts use previously disclosed cues, they may have acted like open-ended cued-invitations for the very young preschoolers studied here. In the future researchers might fruitfully explore the relative usefulness of different types of wh- question addressed to children of different ages, and the ways in which these prompts facilitate memory retrieval. Overall, specific prompts appeared less rather than more effective than invitations when the numbers of elicited details were compared, suggesting that directive questions are useful for eliciting responses, especially on-track responses, from young children but that invitations are superior elicitors of elaborated responses. On average, invitations yielded more information than any other type of prompt, probably because specific prompts lead children to retrieve targeted details whereas open-ended prompts encourage them to retrieve more elaborate information. This attribute of openended prompts has been reported in previous research on young children s memory, both in laboratory analog studies and in forensic contexts (for reviews, see Lamb et al., 2008; Poole & Lamb, 1998). The exceptionally young ages of some children in the current field study allowed us to observe an interesting Age Prompt interaction: As far as the amount of detail was concerned, directives were more productive than invitations for younger children (3- to 4-year-olds) whereas they were less productive than invitations for older children. Previous laboratory analog studies of preschoolers have generally shown that free-recall prompts are effective when addressed to young children (Flin, Boon, Knox, & Bull, 1992; Goodman & Reed, 1986; Johnson & Foley, 1984; Marin, Holmes, Guth, & Kovac, 1979; Oates & Shrimpton, 1991) but have not examined Age Prompt interactions and have not focused on specific age groups, as in the present study. In addition, prompts have been defined differently from study to study, making systematic comparisons impossible. Our examination of the Age Prompt interaction points to a developmental threshold in the effectiveness of free-recall strategies, with free-recall narrative-eliciting prompts reliably more effective only with children aged 5 and older. From an applied point of view, the findings of this study are especially impressive on several counts. First, the results underscore the communicative capabilities of very young children, suggesting that children as young as 3 years of age can be responsive and informative witnesses provided they are properly interviewed. Impressively, these skills were evident in a sensitive context (forensic interviews exploring the possibility of abuse) that was both unfamiliar to the children and more demanding, cognitively and emotionally. Second, their preferential responsiveness to specific prompts accords with the observation by many professionals that very young children perform better when given specific rather than open-ended prompts (Bourg et al., 1999). Third, whereas experts have previously suggested that recognition prompts are necessary when interviewing young children (Hewitt, 1999; Lyon, 1999) because these children have difficulty with free-recall prompts, our results suggest that focused-recall wh- questions may constitute superior alternatives when questioning preschoolers, because they combine the benefits of focus and recall. Questioners can thus accommodate young children s need for more specific prompts and their own desire to obtain accurate information by relying on specific questions that engage recall processes rather than those that involve recognition processes and are thus more likely to prompt inaccurate responses. Fourth, even within the preschool years, it is clear that young children become progressively more adept at responding informatively to open-ended questions, which yield longer and richer responses but still depend on recall rather than recognition processes. These findings are of considerable importance to our understanding of children s developing communicative capacities. Note that the current study focused on the responsiveness of children who voluntarily disclosed abuse

11 Communicative Skills Among Preschoolers 621 in the course of forensic interviews. Communicative processes may be affected by children s reluctance to disclose or describe their abuse (e.g., Pipe, Lamb, Orbach, & Cederborg, 2007), reluctance that may be more common among preschoolers than among older children: Most preschool-aged suspected victims do not disclose when formally interviewed (Hershkowitz et al., 2007; Pipe et al., 2007), either because they have not actually been abused, do not understand the focus of investigation, or prefer not to talk about it. Additional research focused on reluctant children might further broaden our understanding of young children s communicative skills and the factors affecting their participation in conversations and interviews. References Asher, S. R. (1976). Children s ability to appraise their own and another person s communication performance. Developmental Psychology, 12, Baddeley, A. D. (1996). The concept of working memory. In S. E. 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