ABSTRACT
This chapter considers each of linguistic demands of face-to-face conversation, concluding with a more challenging situation in which the child and her partner are not face to face, and thus can rely less extensively on shared context. It moves on to consider forms of extended discourse that require new cognitive and linguistic skills, and which children come to produce more autonomously with age. The extent to which children rely on adults to monitor information level becomes more apparent when one observes their attempts at producing extended discourse independently. Young children have difficulty understanding much of the speech addressed to them; likewise, their own speech is often unintelligible to their adult conversational partners. Other information comes from research in which children's conversational performance is examined in the context of more structured tasks, called referential communication tasks. Conversation and discourse are domains in which development continues well into adulthood, and indeed some adults remain remarkably unskilled throughout their lives.
