Children's Understanding of Indirect Requests

Abstract

Philosophers of language have argued that indirect requests are more difficult to understand than direct requests. Research has indicated, however, that young children respond no differently to these two types of requests. The purpose of the present study was (a) to investigate young children's understanding of direct and indirect requests; (b) to determine how significantly the nonlinguistic context helps children to understand requests; and (c) to explore whether or not young children expect utterances of adults to be requests, thus leading them to respond accordingly. Thirty-five girls and 43 boys ranging from 39 to 77 months of age served as subjects. An analysis of variance demonstrated that (a) very young children understand direct requests significantly better than they understand indirect requests (p < .05), and (b) the nonlinguistic context does not seem to play a significant role in that understanding. Moreover, the responses of the children indicated that they do not necessarily expect utterances of adults to be requests.

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