ABSTRACT
In the language domain, comparable differences in the development of metacognitive abilities have been observed. For example, young children are able to monitor and recognize ambiguity in the first part of a two-part instruction, but tend to judge the whole instruction as clear if the second part of the instruction was unambiguous, even when it did not resolve the initial ambiguity. In contrast, older participants recognize the need to integrate both parts of an instruction to determine ambiguity (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1985). The degree to which such findings might reflect the interaction of language monitoring abilities and memory capacity is not clear. There is some evidence that the developmental change in the ability to monitor spoken prose may be related to the reduced working memory capacity or slower semantic processing of younger children as compared to older children and adults (Holcomb, Coffey, & Neville, 1992; Liu, Bates, Powell, & Wulfeck, 1997; Tyler & Marlsen-Wilson, 1981).
