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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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?