Adult-child discourse: Developmental interaction between information processing and linguistic knowledge

Abstract

The discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. The analyses described were based on longitudinal data from four children from approximately 21 to 3 6 months of age. Categories of child discourse, their development and their interactions with aspects of prior adult utterances form the major results of the study. Child utterances were identified as adjacent (immediately preceded by an adult utterance), or as nonadjacent (not immediately preceded by an adult utterance). Adjacent utterances were either contingent (shared the same topic and added new information relative to the topic of the prior utterance), imitative (shared the same topic but did not add new information), or noncontingent (did not share the same topic). From the beginning, adjacent speech was greater than nonadjacent speech. Contingent speech increased over time; in particular, linguistically contingent speech (that expanded the verb relation of the prior adult utterance with added or replaced constituents within a clause) showed the greatest developmental increase. Linguistically contingent speech occurred more often after questions than nonquestions. The results are discussed in terms of how the differential requirements for processing information in antecedent messages is related to language learning.

Development of social roles in elicited and spontaneous behavior during the preschool years.

“…Other studies have concluded that in pretending, children do not blindly mimic a model but demonstrate only those aspects that they can understand or assimilate (Gottlieb, 1973;Harnick, 1978;McCall, Parke & Kavanaugh, 1977;Scollon, 1976;Slobin & Welsh, 1973). In fact, the modeled actions seem to act as general facilitators of pretending (Watson & Fischer, 1977) as long as the modeling and pretending occur in a context in which the behaviors are appropriate for the child (see Bloom, Rocissano, & Hood, 1976). Also, a similar modeling procedure is commonly used in play therapy with preschool children: The therapist acts out or explains a story or theme of some kind, and the child frequently picks up the story or theme and incorporates it into his or her play (e.g., Harter, 1977).…”

Early communication development and intervention for children with autism

“…With increasing experience, children develop expertise, which leads to increased levels of flexibility and generalization of knowledge. The result is more contextually appropriate behavior in increasingly novel conditions [Bloom et al, 1976;Ross, 1982;Rutter and Durkin, 1987;Eckerman and Didow, 1989]. Although these principles have not been systematically examined in intervention studies involving children with autism, they have implications for designing interventions where diversity and complexity of stimuli within learning contexts are systematically engineered, and tailored to the child's emerging and established abilities.…”

Language Experience and Language Milestones During Early Childhood

“…For conversation to be sustainable for very long, each party's contribution must be relevant to the previous speaker's turn. With development, children increase the contingency of their conversational contributions (Bloom, Rocissano, & Hood, 1976).…”