Children's judgments of utterance appropriateness.

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year olds to examine the bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The results indicated that the 4- and 5-year olds based their judgments in part on factors such as the available nonlinguistic evidence supporting the utterance and the types of evaluative terms used in the utterance. The judgments of the 6-year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children. The findings are discussed in terms of the illocutionary and conversational characteristics of the stimulus utterances.