Incentives improve the clarity of school-age children's referential statements

•Motivational context was found to affect children's referential statements.•School-age children described images more accurately with incentives.•Incentives did not affect inefficient communication strategies.•Preschoolers were not affected by incentives.

Preschoolers (n = 40) and school-aged children (n = 39) participated in a referential communication task in which they described images for a listener. Of interest was whether children would provide clearer descriptions in a highly motivating context, in which they could take home target ‘stickers’ that they described correctly, relative to a less-motivating context in which they simply described target ‘pictures’. School-aged children, but not preschoolers, provided more informative descriptors in the incentive condition. An order effect emerged such that school-aged children who were first offered incentives maintained a high level of performance in the subsequent condition without incentives, whereas school-aged children who first participated in the condition without incentives demonstrated improved performance when subsequently promised incentives. Children's use of inefficient strategies, such as providing redundant descriptors and pointing to the images, was not affected by incentives. Findings demonstrate the impact of subtle methodological differences when examining children's referential communication and highlight the effect of motivational factors on children's communicative performance.