The experiment was designed to see whether children differ from adults in the ability to understand nonverbal responses of other children. Ten third-grade children were secretly filmed while watching a very easy and a very hard math lesson. Third graders, sixth graders, and adults (college students) were asked to judge, based on a film of each…

The relationship between the encoder and the decoder in the communication of nonverbal behavior provides the basis for the two studies described in this report. The first study investigated the ability of parents to decode the nonverbal behavior of their own and other children. Parents were asked to identify children's mode of encoding (natural or…