Child Development

YOUNG CHILDREN'S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Mindy F. Mitnick, Ed.M., M.A.
Licensed Psychologist
5007 France Avenue S. Suite 2
Minneapolis, MN 55410
(612) 927-5111

AGE 3 TO 5

"You said your clothes were on and you said the sticky stuff got on your tummy. I don't understand that part. (No response) When the sticky stuff was on your tummy, were your clothes on or off?"

Interviewing Tip
Avoid asking "Why" questions
Never ask "Why" perpetrator did something.

Help child separate events with questions
"What did Uncle John do on the bed?"
"What did Uncle John do in the van? "

Always ask child to explain
"Tell me who Taneesha is."
"Where was the tent?"
"What did the stick look like?"
"What is the 'backroom?' What's in it?"

Always check out what part of body child is referring to
Always check out who child means when she uses pronoun
Always check out what child means by term she uses. If child can't explain, ask family member.

What the research says....Children age 3-4 to 5-10 questioned 14 months apart about a real life event, provided information with 90% accuracy at each interview but with only 20% overlap in information reported. Fivush and Shukat (1995)

Child may be repeating what she was told by perpetrator: "Let's pretend we're in the Magic Kingdom."

Child may be using only words she has for the unknown: "He touched me with a pink snake."

Ask child to explain
"You said he touched your brother Ryan's peepee, too. Did you see him touch Ryan's peepee? (Yes)
Tell me about that. (No response) Where were you when you saw him touch Ryan?"

Ask questions that are specific enough to obtain desired information:
"Whose house were you at when Uncle John babysat?"
NOT "Where did Uncle John babysit?"

Do not assume child can describe all aspects of perpetrator's appearance, what the car looked like, etc.

Avoid"If... then" questions
"If you had your clothes on, then how did he put his finger in your butt?'

THE USE OF LANGUAGE IN INTERVIEWING CHILDREN

Mindy F. Mitnick, Ed.M., M.A.
Licensed Psychologist

"Two communication styles are inappropriate when interviewing children for forensic purposes: talking as if they were adults, and talking as if they were children."

◙ Children provide the least amount but the most accurate information in response to open-ended questions

◙ "You said he _______. Tell me all about that. Tell me everything you can remember."

Q: "Have you had any touches you didn't like or that made you feel uncomfortable?"

"If interviewers avoid leading questions at all costs, one cost will be abused children who withhold details of their abuse." Tom Lyon, 1999

Child Development

Required Reading

Reprinted with permission from: Walker, A.G. (1999). A few facts about children's language skills. In, Handbook on Questioning Children. Washington, D.C.: ABA Center on Children and the Law.

A Few Facts About Children's Language Skills

Anne Graffam Walker, Ph.D.

Forensic Linguist. 6404 Cavalier Corridor, Falls Church, VA 22044-1207,
(703) 354-1796

average children use language of a grammatical complexity similar to an adults every-day language. Their vocabulary can range from 500-3000+ words. They can identify over five parts of their own bodies.

most children's language is well established, although not yet fully mature. They can define some simple words. They can accurately name three to four colors. With a vocabulary estimated at 13,000-21,000 words, their language sounds on the surface much like an adult's. This misleading surface similarity of language does not mean, however, that these children have achieved mastery of their language. Late acquisitions include (but are not limited to) the ability to handle (1) complex sentences containing relative (who, which, that) or adverbial (when, before, after, while) clauses; (2) some critical verb structures like passives; (3) complex negation, and (4) complex structural distinctions such as those between ask and tell, know and think, easy to (see/please/etc.) and eager to (see, etc.) and some syntactic aspects of the verb "promise." Nor does the apparent similarity mean that children this age have mastered all those concepts expressed in language, such as abstractions (What is truth?) or relations of time, speed, size, duration (When did it happen? How fast was the car going? How big was the knife? How many times did he do that to you?) They do not fully understand the family relationships expressed by kinship terms such as parents, aunt, grandfather, etc.

most children have acquired the ability to use these relational words in an adult fashion.

The ages given here represent approximations of the time when each feature is fully and reliably acquired — meaning that the child can both comprehend and produce the feature. Children reach different stages, of course, at individual times.

Reprinted with permission from: Saywitz, K., Nathanson, R., et al. (1993). Credibility of child witnesses: The role of communicative competence. Topics in Language Disorders. 13(4). 59-78.

Credibility of Child Witnesses: The Role of Communicative Competence

Karen J. Saywitz, PhD
Department of Psychiatry
UCLA School of Medicine
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center

Rebecca Nathanson, PhD
Department of Psychiatry
UCLA School of Medicine
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center

Lynn S. Synder, PhD
Department of Communicative Disorders
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, California

Are children's reports of abuse trustworthy? In cases of alleged sexual or physical abuse, children are often the only source of critical information. There is rarely definitive physical evidence or an adult witness to verify the child's report. Without corroborating evidence, legal professionals rely heavily on the accounts of children, in and out of the courtroom, to discover truth and to protect the welfare of both children and adults. Yet, children often appear to be inconsistent and unreliable witnesses.

Children's apparent lack of credibility has as much to do with the competence of adults to relate to and communicate with children as it does with children's abilities to remember and relate their experiences accurately. The communicative competence of adults and children is an often overlooked determinant of credibility. Broadly defined, communicative competence in the forensic context is the ability of adults to elicit, and of children to provide, reliable information, in a question-answer format, about a potentially traumatic autobiographical event, an event of which the adult has no firsthand knowledge but likely does have preconceived notions based on information provided by others.

The adult questioner's communicative competence depends on the ability to communicate in a nonbiased manner at the child's level of understanding of conversational rules and concepts, accounting for the child's age, vocabulary, and linguistic skill. Children's communicative competence depends on a host of skills required of witnesses, including the ability to translate

memories into language, to deal with noncomprehension, to reason and to distinguish fact from fantasy. Also germane is their knowledge of the legal system and their ability to cope with the stress of testifying. Successful communication entails all these skills. It advances the fact-finding process and the course of justice, protecting children from danger and adults from false accusations. Communication failures obscure the fact-finding process and derail the course of justice, with cases dismissed because of concerns over children's competence and credibility. The remainder of this article reviews the communicative competence of adults and children as questioners and respondents in the forensic context.

Effective communication between adults and children depends on adults' abilities to talk to children in language and concepts they can understand, to mold questions to children's stages of language and cognitive development. However, legal professionals receive little instruction on the norms of child development. Furthermore, the adversarial nature of the process may mean that individual questioners are not motivated to accommodate to children in this way. Defending an adult client may necessitate challenges to witness credibility that obfuscate the communicative process. However, even during confusing cross-examination, the judge has the authority to monitor questioning and intervene when communication breakdowns arise (see Mathews & Saywitz [1992] for discussion). In some states, attorneys calling child witnesses can object to questions on the grounds that such questions are developmentally inappropriate (e.g., California). Thus, there is some protection of the communicative process, but it depends on judges' and attorneys' abilities to recognize developmentally inappropriate questions and to require rephrasing.

Insufficient developmental sensitivity by professionals (as a result of lack of training or the adversarial role) can frustrate children trying to answer questions they are not yet capable of understanding. Often, children are questioned in language too complex for them to comprehend about concepts too abstract for them to understand. For example, a four-year-old was asked, "On the evening of January third, you did, didn't you, visit your grandmother's sister's house and did you not see the defendant leave the house at 7:30, after which you stayed the night?" The child was silent and tearful, the case was dismissed, and as a result, the child was returned to a potentially dangerous environment. Her response was misinterpreted as a lack of both competence and credibility, despite the fact that the question was linguistically complex, with embedded clauses, uncommon uses of negative, and unfamiliar terminology, all beyond her stage of language acquisition; despite the fact that the question required a knowledge of kinship, dates, and times that four-year-olds have not mastered; and despite the fact that it asked several questions under the guise of one question whose answer was restricted to "yes" or "no."

The remainder of the section discusses these common causes of communication breakdown and the credibility of child witnesses that are a function of the form, content, or pragmatics of the questions asked by adults in the forensic context.

Recent studies regarding children's knowledge of legal terms frequently used with children in court suggest that many common terms are unfamiliar to or misinterpreted by children under 10 years of age (Flin, Stevenson, & Davies, 1989; Saywtiz, Jaenicke, & Camparo, 1990). In one study, young children tended to make auditory discrimination errors, mistaking the unfamiliar legal term for a similar sounding familiar word, for example, interpreting jury as jewelry ("jury is that stuff my mom wears around her neck and fingers,") or journey ("a trip") (Saywitz et al., 1990).

Young children also make homonym errors by assuming that a familiar nonlegal definition was the only definition, even in a courtroom. For example, children thought that "court was a place to play basketball," "a hearing is something you do with your ears," "charges are something you do with credit cards." Younger children insisted that the terms did not have different meanings in a court of law. Only older children recognized that the worlds could mean something else in the forensic context (Saywitz et al., 1990).

Young children's tendencies to make these types of errors demonstrate that children think they understand meaning when, in fact, they have a different meaning in mind than the adults. When asked, "Do you know what an allegation is?", a young child is likely to answer "yes" but may be thinking about alligators. Such miscommunication damages children's credibility. For questioners to trust a child's response, they must ask children what a term means in their own words. These studies illustrate that age-appropriate word choice is an important factor in eliciting reliable, credible testimony from children.

Recent studies suggest that there are many types of grammatical constructions that are not mastered by young children but are replete in the conversation of the courtroom (Brennan & Brennan, 1988). In one study, transcripts of 6- to 14-year-old child witnesses during courtroom examinations were reviewed. Agemates' abilities to repeat selected and randomly drawn questions from the transcripts were tested in the laboratory. Repetitions were categorized by the degree to which error in repetition (i.e., rephrasing) captured the sense of the original question. As expected, the results revealed children's misunderstanding of many common courtroom questions.

Studies of language acquisition suggest that lengthy compound sentences with embedded clauses and other linguistic complexities may be beyond the comprehension and memory of many children under eight years of age (see Reich [1986] for a review). However, such overloaded utterances are endemic to the investigative and judicial process. For example, problems often arise when one question contains a number of previously established facts: "When you were on vacation the summer of third grade and you visited your maternal grandmother's house, did your uncle take you to his apartment and what happened there?" Such utterances need to be broken into several short questions requiring short answers to assess the credibility of a child's response.

Transcripts of child witness testimony are replete with utterances that contain multiple options, yet restrict answers to yes or no (Brennan & Brennan, 1988). For example, "Did he push you down and then hurt you? Did he use a weapon and hit you on your leg?" "Yes." It is impossible to know if the child's "yes" refers to being pushed, hurt, or hit or the use of the weapon. Studies of children's perspective-taking and listening skills suggest that children may respond to only a part of the question and not realize that their response may be interpreted as applying to other parts of the question as well (see Dickson [1981] for review). Studies suggest that children less than seven or eight years of age may have difficulty putting themselves in the role of the listener, especially in the unfamiliar forensic context, because young children rely heavily on context to glean meaning.

Adult witnesses can request clarification and explain that such a question could not be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." Studies of children's comprehension monitoring suggest that young children do not routinely ask for clarification, nor do they recognize or announce when adult questions are defective (Flavell, Speer, Green & August, 1981; Markman, 1977, 1979). When children try to answer complex yes/no questions, questioners should ask them to elaborate on their response before judging the credibility of the reply. For example, a child can be asked, "What makes you think so?" or "Can you tell more about that?"

These demonstrate that word choice and grammatical construction are critical factors in eliciting accurate, credible testimony from children.

To a child, the language and procedures of the courtroom resemble a foreign language and culture. The rules of sociolinguistic interaction are governed by intangible rules of evidence, case precedent, and judicial discretion. In contrast, young children rely on everyday rules of communication, even in the unique forensic context, and fail to appreciate that adults are operating under quite a different set of sociolinguistic principles. For example, an implicit postulate of conversation is that listeners expect speakers to be sincere (Grice, 1975). Children under nine years of age may expect a degree of sincerity that is not present in the adversarial process, because they have not yet developed an appreciation for the conditions that violate the sincerity postulate (Demorest, Meyer, Phelps, Gardner & Winner, 1984). Failure to completely understand the speaker's intent could influence, for example, how readily children acquiesce to misleading questions. Such uses of everyday conversational rules in the unique forensic context impair not only perceptions of children's credibility, but the quality of evidence children provide.

Comments that link a discussion with the next topic of conversation are common in typical conversations but are often omitted in the formal courtroom questioning (Brennan & Brennan, 1988). Questions often jump from one topic to another without the necessary introduction for children to switch frames of reference. Studies of the manner in which mothers talk to children (Newhoff & Launer, 1984) suggest that young children rely heavily on adults to structure the conversation and to elaborate on children's responses. Children require transitional comments to signal a change of topic; such comments are rare in the forensic context. For example, "Before, we were talking about school. Now I want to ask you some questions about your mother." The cumulative effect of rapid switching

of topics without proper introduction leaves children disoriented, with little understanding of how and why the questions are being asked. Once again, the conversation and language of the courtroom are poorly matched to that of the child. Accuracy and credibility deteriorate as communication breaks down, not necessarily because children are fabricating their responses or reporting fantasies, but because of adult insensitivity to norms or development.

The content of a question can affect children's credibility. The questioner's knowledge of the norms of cognitive development is crucial to asking for information in a way that allows children to tell what they know. Questions become problematic when they require skills children have not yet developed. Children may try to answer a question when they lack the necessary skill, resulting in adults misinterpreting their answers as indications of incompetence.

Young children learn conventional systems for measuring time, distance, or weight (i.e., in minutes, hours, years, inches, feet, or pounds) gradually over the course of the elementary school years. These are not fully mastered until preadolescence (Friedman, 1982; Saywitz, Goodman, Nicholas, & Moan, 1991; Singer & Revenson, 1978; Brigham, Vanverst, & Bothwell, 1986; Davies, Stevenson, & Flin, 1988). However, to evaluate a suspect's alibi, a witness may be asked to pinpoint the time or duration of an event in minutes and hours; to determine jurisdiction, a witness may be asked to pinpoint a location in terms of miles, city, or state; to identify a perpetrator, a witness may be asked to describe someone's height in feet and inches and weight in pounds. With young children, this information must be elicited in a developmentally sensitive manner that is not common practice in the investigative or judicial process. Consider the examples that follow.

Young children are often asked the time and date of an occurrence, yet children do not learn to tell clock time fully until seven years of age, and even at this age, they still have some trouble with calendar dates. Relating events to familiar routines (e.g., nap time, mealtimes) is often helpful with preschoolers. However, until eight or nine years of age, children may still be confused by a single question asking whether something happened before or after something else. Some attorneys use holidays as reference points: "Was it before or after Christmas?" However, there is no way of knowing whether the child thinks a July event comes "after" the last Christmas or "before" the next Christmas, so the answer has little meaning. Such questions are fertile ground for miscommunication.

When asked the time something occurred, a child may try to answer even though he or she has not yet mastered telling time fully. An implausible guess jeopardizes credibility. However, a young child's inability to tell time need not doom a case to dismissal. A questioner could ask a child what television program he or she was viewing when the event started and then infer the time from the local television guide. Recent studies have begun to demonstrate that such alternate forms of questioning elicit more accurate responses from children (Saywitz et al., 1991).

By eight years of age, children can use the names of the days of the week, and the seasons accurately (Friedman, 1982). They can reason, as an adult would, that if it was hot out and they were dressed in their bathing suits, then the event probably occurred during the summer. They can describe when two events happened together, such as abuse occurring while they were on vacation. However, children under the age of ten may have difficulty reporting events in exact chronologic order (Brown, 1976); but this failing has little bearing on the accuracy of the events they do report, even if reported out of order.

Witnesses are frequently asked how many times something happened; to answer this, a witness must be able to count. Many preschoolers may be able to "count," but this does not mean they understand the underlying number of concepts or can count events in time. For them, counting may be a rote skill, like reciting words to a song. Consider this case of a four-year-old being questioned in court. She provided contradictory responses when asked, "How many times did your daddy do this to you?" She raised both hands, fingers spread widely, indicating 10, and then said, "two times." The judge asked her to count to 10 to test her skills. She did so proudly. She could count to 10 but could not state the number of times she was molested. Her credibility depreciated. When she was later asked to hand an examiner five pennies from an array of 10, she was unable to do so. She could tell whether something happened "once" or "more than once," but could not give an exact number.

Moreover, the question was problematic because it asked her to count how many times "this" happened. The use of "this" required her to devise the units to be counted. For example, if a sexual act happened twice in one night, she might not know whether to count this as one time or two. To receive an accurate response, the adult must be the one to specify the unit (i.e., the specific physical activity) to be counted. Events do not have discrete boundaries. Some children may not be capable of deciding when the event began and ended. They need the adult to specify the action to be counted, but they can count predesignated objects or activities. "How many times did he put his penis inside your vagina?" is more likely to elicit an accurate number than "How many times were you molested?", because the former paints a concrete picture of the exact activity to be counted. Preschoolers reason on the basis of what they see and visualize; therefore, it is best to talk in pictures, not concepts (Piaget, 1928, 1955). Questions about how many times things happened often contribute to inconsistencies in children's reports, which are more a function of adults' questioning than of the child's response.

Young children are not able to estimate a perpetrator's age in years, height in inches, and weight in pounds (Brigham et al., 1986; Davies et al., 1988; Saywitz et al., 1991). However, they can give concrete pieces of information that can help an adult reconstruct physical appearance, such as whether the person was old enough to drive a car or be a grandparent (Saywitz et al., 1991). Children do not have the experience and world knowledge to know which aspects of appearance are permanent and which are readily changed (e.g., hair color), a limitation that hinders the ability to describe or recognize strangers.

In certain situations, preschoolers tend to focus on one aspect of information at a time (Piaget, 1928, 1954). They may think the tallest person in the room is the oldest, focusing on height and not processing information about hair color or wrinkles as indications of age. Thus, when they say someone was old, follow-up questions are necessary to determine why they think the person is old (e.g., "What makes you think he was old?" "Did he have any hair?" "What color was his hair?") Judicious use of nonleading follow-up questions can go a long way to avoiding misinterpretation of children's responses.

In intrafamilial cases of alleged abuse or custody, questions often require discussion of extended family members. For example, in one case an attorney was trying to establish where an event took place and who was present. Because the event ostensibly took place at the paternal grandmother's sister's house and the child had alleged that the grandmother had been present, very complicated kinship relations were involved. The child was asked, "When you were at your grandma's sister's house with your daddy, whose mamma is your grandma?" She replied, "Grandma Ann," giving her grandmother's name. When asked, "Is she your daddy's mamma?" The child replied, "Daddy's mamma," repeating the end of the sentence; a common response when children do not fully understand the question but know that it is time for them to take their turn in the conversation. After one last repetition of the question, she answered, "She has a boyfriend, two boyfriends," an irrelevant response.

This four-year-old appeared unable to identify her grandmother who was allegedly present at the time of the molestation. However, young children do not understand kinship relations the way adults understand them (Elkind, 1962;*Haviland & Clark, 1974; Piaget, 1928). "Grandma Ann" can be interpreted similarly to the name "Mary Joe." Knowing the name that grandma is called by does not imply that a young child can imagine that daddy was once a baby and had a mother, just as she does, and that this older woman is that person. This requires the mental operation of reversibility, or the ability to change direction of thought. For example, a child this age knows she has a sister but may not realize she is a sister to her sister. Inquiries about kinship with children younger than 10 must be carefully monitored to avoid creating unnecessary confusion that threatens credibility.

Questions that require witnesses to do complex, abstract reasoning often obscure the factfinding process. Children are not aware of their own limitations and may try to use trial and error to reason out something that can only be solved with more complex reasoning skills. Preschoolers reason on the basis of what they see. Requests that involve other types of reasoning, such as hypothetical reasoning, lead children to try to answer questions they are incapable of answering. It is not difficult to see how this creates contradictions and inconsistencies in their testimony.

Although three- and four-year olds can sometimes see another person's point of view quite accurately, it is not until the age of seven that children have a fully developed ability to view the world from other perspectives consistently (Selman & Byrne, 1974). Children gradually develop the

ability to infer what others are intending, thinking, feeling, and perceiving (Shantz, 1975). Consequently, young children have difficulty answering questions about what another person might have been intending. Questions such as "Why didn't you run away when he shut the windows and closed the doors?" require a young child to draw inferences about someone else's intentions. Children may end up contradicting themselves, not because they are lying, but because they are stretching to try to explain something they do not understand.

These examples illustrate that children may appear unreliable as a result of compelling them to answer questions requiring skills beyond their stage of communicative or cognitive development. Molding the language and content of the question to the child's level is necessary for credible evidence to emerge.

Children's communicative competence is affected not only by the intelligibility of their speech, but also by their level of comprehension, cognition, memory, and emotional functioning. Children's potential for successful communication in pretrial interviews and courtroom examination depends on their development in areas ranging from comprehension, logic, memory, fantasy-reality distinction, and knowledge of the legal system to sexual knowledge, suggestibility, temperament, and emotional adjustment.

The ability to know whether one understands a question and to use strategies for coping with noncomprehension develops-gradually with age (Dickson, 1981; Flavell, 1981; Singer & Flavell, 1981). Although preschoolers have been shown to recognize comprehension difficulties and implement strategies for resolving them, they are able to do so only in naturalistic settings when tasks and stimuli are simple, familiar, and require nonverbal responses to physically present referents (Gallagher, 1981; Garvey, 1977; Revelle, Wellman, & Karabenick, 1985). In contrast, in experimental studies with unfamiliar settings where tasks and stimuli tend to be complex and verbal, young children have difficulty detecting message adequacy. They may not know when they have failed to understand. Therefore, they rarely question ambiguous messages or request clarification from adults (Asher, 1976; Cosgrove & Patterson, 1978; Ironsmith & Whitehurst, 1978; Markman, 1977; Patterson, Masad, & Cosgrove, 1978). Children are likely to demonstrate similar difficulties in the forensic context because the setting is unfamiliar, it lacks physically present referents, and the task requires not only communication skills, but also memory.

A recent study suggests that even when children do not comprehend lengthy, complex questions about past events, they typically try to answer these questions anyway. Children between six and eight years of age were asked syntactically complex questions about a past event (Saywitz & Snyder, 1993). Strategies for responding ranged from requests for repetition to answering a part of the question that they thought they understood (typically the beginning or ending of questions). Requests for the question to be rephrased were rare. Initially children were as likely to respond inaccurately as accurately to difficult questions. When they were first instructed to tell the questioner when they did not understand and the questions were rephrased at the request of the children, the children provided more accurate responses. After an intervention in which they practiced asking for

rephrasing of questions about a previously viewed videotaped vignette, children were most likely to indicate they did not understand, to ask for rephrasing, and then to respond accurately. A child's communicative competence depends heavily on the ability to detect and cope with noncomprehension, a skill that may be enhanced through instruction and preparation.

Some of the confusion in children's testimony stems from egocentric assumptions that adults view things as they do. In fact, they may even believe that the adult knows about an event as the child knows it (Piaget, 1955). For example, children may believe that the attorney already knows who was present and where an event took place. When asked, "Was your mother there?" a child may answer, "Of course."

Another common childhood assumption is that adults already know the answers to the questions they are asking. In the child's small world of home and school, parents and teachers frequently know the answers and are testing the child's knowledge. In the context of the courtroom, they may have no understanding of why they have to answer the same questions that they have already answered in previous interviews with the same attorney or that they have just answered on direct examination. Because they assume the adult knows the answer, they often feel frustrated or angered by repeated questions, but they are less apt to put their feelings in perspective and less able to keep feelings from affecting their behavior and credibility.

Adults often devalue what a child has to offer because of a few unbelievable comments. Such comments are frequent among preschoolers due to their limited use of logic, but they should not invalidate the rest of what a child can offer. Preschoolers generalize in ways that seem illogical as they go about creating explanations for what they observe (Piaget, 1954). For example, they may assume that two events observed closely together in time are causally related (e.g., "I have not had my nap, so it isn't afternoon yet" or "The train went by because the dog barked," a reverse explanation of the dog barking because the train went by) (Singer & Revenson, 1978). The child is unsure of the causal relations, not about the existence of the train or the dog. Studies show that children can report facts accurately, even when they misinterpret other aspects of the event or draw implausible inferences (Goodman & Clarke-Stewart, 1991). In this regard children bring both strengths and weaknesses to the interview. They may agree with adult interpretations of ambiguous events suggested through strongly worded interrogations, but report what they saw or heard quite accurately. Such inconsistencies are not fantasies or lies, but have a logic of their own commensurate with children's stage of cognitive development. Listeners must not assume that a child understands or responds in the same way adults do.

Sometimes a child's response sounds more like fantasy than reality because of the vocabulary used by the child. Such a response calls for follow-up questions. For example, consider a child who

insists that there were monsters in the room when the abuse took place, until she is asked, "What kind of monsters were they?" She responds "puppet monsters." Another problem is the danger that the child and the questioner are talking about two different events but do not realize this (Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992). Care must be taken to avoid a fantasy-based interpretation of a child's accurate report of some other past event.

In an early stage of development, children three to five years of age appear to engage in magical thinking, creating or accepting illogical explanations (Piaget, 1954). For example, they may believe that inanimate objects possess animate characteristics (e.g., if you cut thread, the thread experiences pain). Such illogical reasoning does not render the rest of the testimony inaccurate or irrelevant. To a preschooler, the workings of a television are magical. It is not difficult to confuse young children into agreeing that a cartoon character is "real." Such ad admission has no bearing on a child's ability to recount the facts of what happened to him but may harm his credibility.

From a young age, children use pretend in their play, but they seem to know when they are pretending; for example, they are not pacified with a pretend cookie when they are hungry (Garvey, 1977). There is little evidence to support the notion that most children routinely confuse fact with fantasy. Studies have found that a small number of children (1% to 3%) do give fantasy responses when questioned about a past real-life event (Goodman & Aman, 1990; Rudy & Goodman, 1991). Of course the experimental event and the children's fantasy responses were not about sexual or traumatic experiences. Overall, researchers have found some conditions under which children have more difficulty distinguishing what they imagined from real memories and situations in which young children have no difficulty distinguishing between the two (Johnson & Foley, 1984), although research in this area is not complete. In one set of studies, children were no more likely than adults to confuse memories of what two other people did or said. In other words, children accurately remembered who said and did what (Johnson & Foley, 1984). For example, six-year-olds did have more difficulty than adults in determining memories of what they themselves had said or done alone from what they had only imagined themselves saying or doing alone. Additionally, two- and three-year-olds have not been similarly tested and may have more difficulty sorting out the real from the imagined. On the other hand, children were no more likely than adults to confuse memories of what two other people did or said.

Still, the relevance of this type of research to children's testimony may be limited by many differences between laboratory situations and an actual case; laboratory tasks typically underestimate rather than overestimate children's capabilities in natural settings. Children's memory skills are considerably improved when the events are meaningfully embedded in children's lives (Donaldson, 1978; Melton & Thompson, 1989; Nelson, 1986). Children typically testify about events that are compelling, vivid, and important embedded in the context of their lives (Melton & Thompson, 1989; Whitcomb, Shapiro, & Stellwagen, 1985).

In summary, a child's ability to communicate what happened will be influenced by stage of development, adults' ability to ask age-appropriate follow-up questions to clarify potential misunderstandings, and adults' understanding that children's isolated beliefs in fantasy figures (e.g., Santa Claus) need not indicate incompetence.

Much of the concern that children may testify to sexual fantasies rather than real-life experiences originated with classic Freudian theory, however, in current theories of child development, the Oedipal conflict (fantasies of sex with the opposite-sex parent) has fallen from prominence (Bower, 1991; Stern, 1985). Even though young children may intentionally lie and misstate reality, they have limited knowledge of adult sexual activities from which to invent detailed plausible descriptions (Goldman & Goldman, 1982; Gordon, Schroeder, & Abrams, 1990). A minority of preschoolers may be familiar with the idea of genital penetration for the purpose of reproduction, but knowledge of anal and oral sex, as well as details to ejaculation (such as the taste of semen) are unfamiliar. Unless young children have been personally or vicariously exposed to adult sexual activity, they are unlikely to possess the knowledge to fabricate believable, detailed descriptions of firsthand experiences.

Often children's descriptions may sound implausible to adults, because they draw on limited experience to understand and explain unfamiliar occurrences. For example, in one case a child described semen as tasting like orange juice. However, in response to follow-up questions ("What makes you think it tastes like orange juice?",), he explained that they both tasted a little sweet and a little sour, restoring his credibility. Many assumptions about children's fantasies are derived from adult failures to bridge the gap between the child's world and the adult's world.

Children's communicative competence in the courtroom is also a function of their understanding of the investigative and judicial process. Recent studies have identified misconceptions held by children under 10 years of age, as well as their limited understanding of the system (Flin et al., 1989; Melton, Limber, Jacobs, & Oberlander, 1992; Saywitz, 1989). Thus, children may not have a context for understanding the needs of the various people, their functions, or the rules by which people interact in the legal setting. Their misunderstandings can result in heightened or unrealistic fears, failure to recognize the significance or consequences of their testimony, and failure to use the "big picture" to put their feelings in perspective and to cope with the stress of testifying.

One study found the following developmental pattern (Saywitz, 1989): Many four- to seven-year-olds did not know that the judge is in charge of the courtroom and assumed that the unfamiliar faces in the jury box were friends of the defendant, rather than impartial decision makers. Some children in this age range viewed court as a "room you pass by on your way to jail" and had no concept of a trial; some believed that a child witness went to jail if he or she made a mistake on the stand. As with younger children, eight- to 11-year-olds assumed that witnesses would be believed and that judges were omniscient and knew when witnesses were not telling the truth. They could be taken by surprise at the disbelieving tone of cross-examination.

Eight- to 11-year olds began to understand that an arrest lead to an intermediary stage in which a judge listened to information and made a decision about guilt or innocence. They were aware that the court is a fact-finding process that seeks to uncover the truth. Many believed that jurors were no different from other spectators, assuming the judge makes all the decision.

By 12 to 14 years of age, children came to understand that a judgment was rendered through a process with roles for attorneys, witnesses, and jurors, and through laws rather than at the whim of the judge. They began to develop a sense of a societal role for the legal system beyond one-to-one relationships of courtroom personnel. They also came to understand that the process did not always uncover the truth and that decisions could be made on the basis of erroneous information. Although they knew that the jury decides the verdict in most cases, they were still confused, as are many adults, regarding the relationship between the judge and the jury (e.g., "The judge and jury go off together during recess to discuss the case so the judge does not get blamed for the decision.")

The degree to which children misunderstand the forensic process may influence their verbal and nonverbal responses to questions in ways that are not yet understood completely. For example, lack of eye contact with jurors, based on children's thinking at jurors are only spectators, may influence jurors' assessments of children's credibility. Children's lack of preparation and limited knowledge can result in misunderstandings associated with depreciated credibility. However, a recent study demonstrated the beneficial effects of preparation that demystifies the legal process by educating children about the system (Sas, 1991).

Testifying requires not only memories of past events, but also the translation of those memories into verbal responses communicated to an adult audience within the constraints of the forensic context (e.g., question-answer format). Child witnesses' communicative competence is affected by the interaction between memory processing and communication skills. In general, studies have not found a simple relationship between memory and age. Under certain conditions, children do less well than adults in providing accurate eyewitness reports, while under other conditions, they may out-perform adults, remembering details unnoticed by adults but salient to children, the accuracy of children's memories is a function not only of the child, but also of the circumstances of the event to be remembered, the type of memory test, the type of information requested, and the setting of the interview. For example, studies suggest that children, like adults, are more accurate in reporting the central actions of events that are personally meaningful to them than they are in reporting peripheral details (Goodman, Rudy, Bottoms, & Aman, 1990; Fivush & Hammond, 1991; Saywitz et al., 1991; Tucker, Mertin, & Luszcz, 1990). Thus children may provide very accurate descriptions of the "corpus of the crime" (i.e., the unlawful actions that were committed), but they may not be able to provide detailed descriptions of strangers, such as eye and hair color, that are important for identifying a perpetrator.

Consider another factor on which children's memory abilities depend: the physical and psychological setting of the questioning. Studies have found that children's ability to identify an unfamiliar adult in a line-up suffers in an intimidating environment (Dent, 1977; Peters, 1991). Other studies found that children report more accurate narratives of past autobiographical events in familiar, informal settings than in a mock courtroom with a simulated trial examination (Saywitz & Nathanson, in press). Preliminary findings from one study suggest children show more erratic heart rate patterns and impoverished free recall during mock testimony than in a private room (Saywitz & Nathanson, 1992). More research is needed to fully understand the interactions between the factors that determine the accuracy of a child's memory such as environment and anxiety. However, certain developmental trends have been noted in the literature.

Overall, studies suggest that even young children possess the memory skills needed to testify, at least when they are asked simple and direct questions in a relatively neutral or supportive environment (Goodman, Bottoms, Schwartz-Kenny, & Rudy, 1991; Melton, 1991). Even two-year-olds can verbally describe some of the central aspects of events they have experienced up to six months earlier. With age, children's memories become more detailed, organized, complete, and resistant to misleading questions (Nelson, 1986).

In general, young children's spontaneous answers to "Tell me what happened" are quite accurate but incomplete. We are all familiar with the skeletal nature of their reports, "What did you do after school?" ("I played.") More information is forthcoming when adults ask specific questions. "Where did you play?" ("On the playground.") "Who did you play with?" ("Mary and Jane.") Children do not necessarily remember less than adults, but they are less proficient at producing information without guidance to stimulate memory of the kind of information and level of detail relevant to the questioner in the forensic context.

In the forensic context, there is concern that such guidance not only facilitates but potentially contaminates a child's testimony. The memories of both children and adults are vulnerable to suggestive questions. People are most likely to accept someone else's suggestion (e.g., when introduced into a multiple choice or leading question) when their own memory is weak (e.g., as time since the event increases). This is especially true of peripheral detail (Loftus, 1979; Goodman & Reed, 1986). Many factors affect children's suggestibility such as social status of questioner, participation in the event, phrasing of the question, and type of information requested.

In general, children are most resistant to misleading questions about salient actions that are personally meaningful and embedded into their lives. In several studies, children have shown resistance to false suggestions about abuse-related actions such as removing their clothes or being touched or photographed while naked (Rudy & Goodman, 1991; Saywitz et al., 1991). In general, studies show that by 11 years of age, children appear to be no more suggestible than adults, with children under four being the most vulnerable to suggestion. Between the ages of 4 and 10 years, studies are inconsistent. Children are more vulnerable to suggestion when the event is ambiguous; the information requested is a peripheral detail, innocuous, or not salient for children; and the questioning is coercive and intimidating (Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987; Clarke-Stewart, Thompson, & Lepore, 1989). They are resistant to false suggestions regarding central aspects of the event that are personally meaningful and salient.

Thus, an accusatory climate or forceful, repeated interrogation based on adults' preconceptions could be highly damaging to young children's testimony. The use of leading or specific questions must be considered carefully. Avoidance of leading questions based on preconceptions ("He hurt you, didn't he?") is typically recommended. However, specific questions that offer children guidance toward triggering recall and facilitating communication may be necessary because children's spontaneous descriptions are so skeletal. When specific questions require only yes/no, or one-word, responses, follow-up questions are recommended to force children to justify, clarify, and elaborate ("What makes you think so?" "How do you know?"). This provides an opportunity for misunderstandings to be exposed and repaired.

Some studies indicate that there is a cost-benefit analysis to be conducted in determining when to ask specific questions in the forensic context. One study suggested that unless specific questions about genital contact were asked, the vast majority of genital touch incidents went unreported, as children rarely volunteered emotionally laden, potentially embarrassing information about genital contact in response to open-ended questions such as "What happened?" (Saywitz et al., 1991). On the other hand, the specific questions about genital touch also led to a small percentage of children falsely affirming vaginal touch (3%) or anal touch (5%) that had not occurred during a previous medical examination. If replicated in studies with increasingly more ecologically valid paradigms for generalization to cases of abuse, such false accusations even if infrequent, are of grave concern. More studies are needed to investigate the relative costs and benefits of leading questions and the least contaminating methods for questioning children in paradigms that more closely resemble forensic cases.

In the past, the vast majority of research on children's suggestibility has focused on children's memory, not their communicative competence in the forensic context. Recently, some attention has been paid to children's awareness of the unique conversational demands of the courtroom. In a recent study, researchers tested an intervention designed to improve children's awareness that questioners might put their guesses into questions and ask for confirmation, depending on their role in the system (Saywitz, Moan, & Lamphear, 1991). children who received this brief intervention prior to questioning about a past school activity demonstrated significantly more resistance to misleading questions in a subsequent interview regarding memory for the activity(Saywitz & Synder, 1993). They made fewer errors in response to misleading questions than a control group who did not receive the intervention. They tended to say "I don't know" or "I don't remember" rather than acquiescing. However, they also responded this way more often to nonleading questions, reducing their correct responses. This study suggests that child witnesses may be able to provide more reliable testimony, even in the face of misleading questions, if they better understand the unique sociolinguistic interactions of the forensic context. It also suggests that interventions must be carefully tested and revised to eliminate side effects that alter children's testimony in an unanticipated fashion.

In conclusion, further investigation of children's eyewitness memory is needed. More ecologically valid methodologies must be implemented, and theories must be expanded to encompass the influences of communication, context, and emotion on children's eyewitness performance.

A child's communicative competence can be affected by various aspects of emotional functioning. For example, children under stress frequently regress to more immature levels of behavior, which may compromise their ability to testify. They may have difficulty using advanced grammatical constructions that they have used in familiar nonstressful environments, and they may have difficulty comprehending constructions that they have mastered in other contexts.

Children of different temperaments react to the communicative demands of the courtroom in very different ways. A shy, insecure, withdrawn five-year-old may refuse to testify or may burst into tears, while an outgoing, confident, five-year-old may proceed with minimal difficulty. These

differences have little to do with the truthfulness of their testimony, but the former child may be judged less credible than the latter. Children's ability to cope with the stress of the traumatic event that brought them to the attention of the court or with the stress of the legal process itself will affect the competence with which they communicate their story and, in turn, adults' perceptions of their credibility.

Children differ widely in their reactions to abuse, victimization, parental discord, and violence, regardless of age. Where one child might become depressed, another might become unbearable anxious, another angry, aggressive, or self-destructive. For example, a child who suffers depression as a result of abuse or parental loss may show poor concentration, long pauses before responding, or lack of motivation and interest. This child may fail to make eye contact, answer in one-word utterances, and appear withdrawn. Even older children who are depressed may appear to be uninterested in the trial or unmotivated to repair miscommunications. These symptoms affect the child's demeanor and therefore may be mistaken for lack of credibility or for dishonesty, but they have little validity for predicting truthfulness. Severely depressed children are likely to have feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and helplessness. Their ability to defend their testimony against harsh cross-examination may be minimal. They may be easily confused, creating the appearance of inconsistencies and contradictions that undermine their credibility.

Several psychological disturbances resulting from trauma can dramatically alter a child's demeanor on the stand. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not uncommon in abuse victims or witnesses to homicide. Some of these children may experience flashbacks of the traumatic event while testifying or being interviewed. For these children, it may feel as if they are reliving, not merely retelling, the traumatic event. One way to cope with such intense anxiety is to separate oneself emotionally from the experience. This is sometimes referred to as dissociation. When children dissociate, they may appear unaffected by the trauma they are describing. They cope with their anxiety by psychologically distancing themselves from the immediate situation, sometimes referred to as psychic numbing. They may appear to stare off into space as if they are daydreaming. This seeming lack of emotion is often mistaken as evidence that the child is inventing testimony, especially in cases of abuse; it is a common misconception that abused children will act upset when they testify. Nonverbal communications driven by affect are often as critical to credibility as what the child says.

Some children, such as those with past histories of suicidal thoughts and behaviors or children with phobias regarding public speaking, are particularly vulnerable to the stress of the process. Likewise, those children with a history of severe anxiety disorders, panic attacks, or thought disorders are vulnerable. These children may have difficulty testifying under standard conditions without the benefit of special court procedures, such as allowing support persons to be present, closing the courtroom to spectators, or using closed-circuit television as an alternative to face-to-face confrontation with the defendant. Additional modifications offered children in some states include scheduling frequent breaks; limiting testimony to school hours; allowing favorite objects on the stand; allowing objections on the grounds that questions are developmentally inappropriate; appointing separate counsel for child witnesses; using experts in child development; using videotaped testimony before trial; modifying jury instructions; and utilizing child-friendly courtroom layouts.

Information about children's emotional and communicative functioning is often critical to evaluating their need for special court procedures. Again, the availability of these special court procedures in turn affects their credibility. Children's credibility is a function of their own strengths and weaknesses and the ability of adults to create an optimal environment for them to tell what they know.

This article has defined communicative competence quite broadly. The need for this conceptualization is derived from the premise that a child's credibility is a function of a complex interaction among the adult interviewer, judge, or juror (questioner, listener); the child victim-witness (respondent); and the forensic context (pre-trial interviews, courtroom examination, availability of special court procedures). Efforts to elicit reliable testimony from children are frustrated by personnel insensitive to children's stages of development; developmental limitations on children's abilities; and the rules of evidence and procedure customary in the forensic context. There is a discrepancy between the typical process by which evidence is gathered and the developmentally sensitive process necessary to elicit information from young children. Consequently, children may not be able to provide information in pretrial interviews or courtroom questioning at the optimal level of which they are capable and may experience higher levels of system-related stress than necessary.

Thus far the focus has been on the questioner and the respondent, with minimal regard for the context. A full exposition of the forensic context is beyond the scope of this article, but it is sufficient to say that legal practices were designed neither to maximize the accuracy of children's reports nor to minimize children's stress. For example, the practice of generously granting delays and continuances can extend the duration of a case from days and weeks to months and years. Recent studies suggest that resulting retention intervals may erode young children's memories more than older children or adults, thus interfering with their ability to testify at the optimal level of which they are capable (Brainerd, Reyna, Howe, & Kingman, 1990). Furthermore, recent studies suggest that duration is negatively related to resuming healthy emotional functioning after trauma (Goodman, Pyle-Taub, Jones, England, Port, Rudy, & Prado, 1989; Runyan, Everson, Edelsohn, Hunter, & Coulter, 1988; Whitcomb et al., 1985). Thus, recovery from the often traumatic events that bring children to the attention of the court could be thwarted inadvertently by such delays (Weiss & Berg, 1982). Accommodations by the legal system (e.g., limiting delays) may create an optimal environment in which children can tell the truth to the best of their ability. In this manner, credibility becomes a function not only of the interaction between the adult and the child, but also of the context — that is, the degree to which the system creates an optimal environment for communication between children and adults.

A comparison of two cases will illustrate the interaction among these factors. Consider the testimony of a four-year-old who was alleged to have been the victim of sexual abuse by a teacher's aide in a preschool six months earlier. A four-year-old girl with strong parental support, showing no signs of serious psychological distress, can provide accurate information regarding what happened to her, testifying about a known person, a familiar place, and a personally meaningful event, providing the examiner takes into account her stage of language and a cognitive development. She can respond accurately to direct questions about major actions that occurred when the syntax and vocabulary are age appropriate, the environment neutral or supportive. She may require creative methods of eliciting

information about dates or timing, concepts she has not fully mastered. She may need age appropriate preparation, the presence of support persons, and the comfort of a favored object to communicate effectively in the courtroom.

On the other hand, consider an 11-year-old, whose age suggests adult-like memory and resistance to suggestion but whose psychological functioning and severity of abuse suggest she may have more difficulty communicating in the courtroom than the younger child. An 11-year-old alleged victim suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, testifying to allegations of forcible rape in a high-profile case against a well-respected member of the community may experience acute levels of embarrassment and self-consciousness that could render her testimony incomplete or inconsistent with out-of-court statements, especially if she fears the likelihood of public exposure and rejection by peers. Her diagnosis suggests that testifying under stressful conditions could stimulate serious psychological reactions, such as flashbacks that make her feel as though she is reliving the crime while testifying. She may require greater protective measures than a younger child to facilitate successful communication.

These two examples demonstrate the fallacy of assuming that the younger child is always the less able witness and instead illustrate the complexity involved in evaluating children's testimony. This article has focused on the role of communicative competence in this multifarious process, a variable that has been frequently overlooked. Our goal was to place children's inconsistencies in the context of adult-child communication within the constraints of the forensic process, demonstrating that communication breakdowns are responsible for a substantial portion of the apparent unreliability of children's testimony. This is not to say that children will never lie, fantasize, or repeat stories that they are coached to tell. Our intent was to clarify that lying, fantasizing, and coaching are not the only reasons a child's testimony might seem unbelievable or unreliable. Another plausible reason is the mismatch between the linguistic, cognitive, and emotional worlds of children and adults, a mismatch that obfuscates communication with child witnesses. Throughout the text, we have suggested that this mismatch could be minimized by child development training for legal professionals, developmentally sensitive interview protocols, adequate preparation of child witnesses, special court procedures, and additional research. Such future efforts should serve to facilitate successful communication between children and adults, thereby advancing the course of justice.

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Feature	Example	Approximate Age

Adjectives	Comparatives (e.g., more, bigger)	4 to 5
	Superlatives (e.g., most, biggest)	3 to 6
	Ability to make complex comparisons in response to questions (e.g., Which box is taller than it is fat?)	6 and older

Adverbs	Distinction between before/after	7 and older
	"Frontwards," "sidewards," "backwards"	About 7

Articles	Full mastery of contrast between "the" and "a"	8

Prepositions	In, on (first two acquired)	114 to 2
	Off, out (of), away (from)	2 to 3
	Toward, up, down	3 to 314
	In front of, next to, around	314 to 4
	Beside	4 to 454
	Ahead of, behind	414 to 514

Pronouns	Possessives: My, your, their, mine, his	314
	Possessives: Her(s), his, its, our(s)	3 to 5
	Deictic ("Pointing") pronouns: "this" versus "that" (when no fixed referent is available)	7 and over
	Accurate matching of pronouns to prior or following nouns	About 10

Verb contrast	Between "come" and "go," "bring" and "take"	7 to 8 and over
	Between "tell" and "ask"	8 to 10

WH questions: (WHat, WHere, WHo, WHy, How, WHen)	Appear in child's speech (in approximately the order to the left)	2½ to 4½
	Appropriate grammatical response to WH questions acquired	5½
	Appropriate cognitive response to WHy, How, WHen	About 10

Syntactic Skills

Feature	Example	Approximate Age

Passives	With action verbs (e.g., hit, push)	5 and over
	With all verbs, including non-action (e.g., like); earliest form: agentless "get" passives (e.g., I got hit)	7 to 10

"Tag" questions	E.g., "Xxx, isn't it?" But when combined with negatives ("That's not what she said; isn't that so?") can be confusing into adulthood	Over 4

Conversational Skills

Feature	Example	Approximate Age

Understanding turn-taking		Before 2

Asking contingent questions	Contingent questions relate to the immediately prior utterance; e.g., questions which indicate that something just said is not fully understood, such as: "What did you say?"	By 3

Ability to report typical Events	E.g., what happens at a birthday party	3

Ability to describe, narrate, and inform in adult-satisfactory way		Still developing in Jr. and Sr. High School years