Aylin Küntay PSYC 453 Meeting 19 Development of discourse and pragmatic abilities: beyond words and sentences Aylin Küntay PSYC 453 Meeting 19

Communicative competence vs. linguistic competence: mastery of words and sentences Hymes (1972): ¨we have to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner.¨ skill in adapting linguistic competence to the social and communicative demands of the situation

Communicative competence social routines: parents explicitly train their children in marking social events, such as leave-taking (bye-bye) or gift receiving (thank you) elema (xxx say) routines in Kaluli children are explicitly directed to repeat utterance to third parties in many cultures, parents believe that training children in the social uses of language is very important in child rearing

Discourse development Conversational skills turn taking listener orientedness making relevant contributions initiating, maintaining, and shifting to topics formulating speech acts such as requests, offers Narrative skills the ability to tell a coherent narrative requires cognitive, social, and linguistic sophistication

Topic relatedness (conversational coherence) Longitudinal study of adult-child discourse by Bloom 19-23 months: many adjacent utterances, but most are not contingent on the adult’s topic contingent utterances are those that share the same topic with the preceding utterance and add info to it children at this age period have a lot of semantic and syntactic knowledge but not enough conversational skills 35-38 months: not as many adjacent utterances, but many are contingent the ability to initiate new conversational topics also develops

Conversational repairs monitor partner’s miscomprehension and make a retry-- repetition or rephrasal around 12 months, children show a tendency to repair by repeating their original utterance, or augmenting it gesturally or with vocal emphasis by about 16 months, children do rephrasals by keeping the same communicative intent but changing the grammatical form 24 month old children treat their mothers not as omniscient, but as communicative partners who might need more info

Listener orientedness Shatz & Gelman: looked at the differences in the speech of 4-year-olds to adults vs. 2-year-olds to 2-year-olds, they used shorter and simpler sentences code-switching according to the conversational partner Referential communication tasks being able to package the info in a way that takes into account the perceptual and informational status of the listener shows development throughout preschool ages need to take into account children´s developing theory of mind

Pragmatics In a pragmatic analysis, every utterance has 3 aspects (Austin, Grice, Searle) locutionary act: grammatical form of the utterance illocutionary force: the intent of the speaker to accomplish some goal, such as informing, requesting, promising, etc. perlocutionary effect: the effect that the utterance has on the listener-- how they respond to the illocutionary force of the speaker’s utterance

Requests Bates: protoimperatives (one type of early illocutionary act) use adults to get out of reach objects two-word utterances such as my rabbit, more swing, mummy read, no ride many early utterances have the IF of requests of goods and services as children grow older and linguistically more sophisticated, interactants demand clearer articulation of desires, greater politeness, greater awareness of status differences

Requests: Control Acts Early requests are direct: bare imperatives such as in sit, more Ervin-Tripp: indirect requests such as ‘Would you like to play doctor?’ and ‘You could give me one’ develop later politeness forms: addressing the preferences or the ability of the hearer, rather than making a request of what is wanted 4-year-olds tend to use polite forms such as `Can I have…’ when they are not sure of the listener’s compliance use a bare imperative when compliance is assumed hints-- inexplicit directives-- are late to develop

Narrative development Elicited narratives vs. conversational narratives frog story is an elicited picturebook narrative conversational narratives are mostly personal and require the suspension of conversational turntaking Coherence relations local cohesion (connecting successive sentences through connective devices) global coherence (thematic progression of events)--- your codingg

Global thematic structure Peterson & McCabe (1983): 1124 narratives from children aged 3;5-9;5 developmental changes before 6, chains of successive, unrelated utterances by 6, children provide a setting, a story problem/complication, and describe how the problem was resolved (resolution), and provide evaluative remarks about the point of the story

Wednesday Nazlı and I will be in class on Wed to answer your questions about your research and poster When will the poster session be? Any Qs we can address now?