Abstract
This study investigated young children's external source monitoring abilities of 4- to 6-year-olds to identify the source of information presented in different modalities. During an acquisition phase, three sets of target words were presented in three different presentation formats: auditory only (presented through an audio player), audio-visual only (presented through a video player), and both auditory and audio-visual (presented through both audio and video players). During a test phase, the participants were given a recognition test and a source monitoring test in which they were asked to identify the source of each word from among four alternatives (audio only, video only, both, neither). The results indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds made more source monitoring errors than the 6-year-olds. The 4- and 5-year-olds were more accurate in identifying words presented by video than words presented by an audio source, whereas the 6-year-olds showed no such differences. Furthermore, 4- to 6-year-olds had the greatest difficulty in making “both” judgment. These findings indicate that external source monitoring abilities to distinguish between audio and video presentations develop over the preschool years.
