Saltzman, A. L., & Townsend, D. J. (1980). Children can learn to communicate in a word-pair task: Evidence against egocentrism. Developmental Psychology, 16(1), 83-84.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.16.1.83
Showed 48 kindergarten, 48 2nd-, and 48 4th-grade Ss word-pairs (e.g., cow–horse) and asked them to generate a 1-word clue that did not rhyme with the target word (cow) so that another person could guess which was the underlined word. Each S was assigned to a good-communicator or poor-communicator group and was then assigned to a training condition or a no-training condition. Ss in the training condition were taught how to generate effective clues. The results indicate that training fosters an increase in clue generation ability and that communication ability in a word-pair task is modifiable. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)