Children's understanding of how noise disrupts verbal communication

An abstract understanding of communication should support reasoning about both its success and failure: why it fails, what happens as a consequence, and how to fix it. Auditory noise frequently corrupts verbal communication, but little is known about how humans come to reason about it. The current work explored American 3- to 5-year-olds' third-party reasoning (Experiment 1, N = 168, 95 female) and communicative behaviors (Experiment 2, N = 48, 23 female) in noisy environments between 2021 and 2024. Children understood that auditory noise impedes others' hearing and prevents knowledge transmission, and they modified their own communication by gesturing more when their partner could not hear. Thus, even young children understand how noise disrupts communication and can communicate effectively in its presence.