W1A-008 Pragmatic development-0.txt
Chapter 4 The Development of Pragmatic Abilities in young children- Part 2: The social organisation of discourse 4.1. Introduction:

The preceding chapter examined how the young child learns to communicate intentions, and how he/she develops awareness of the listener's needs in the communicative situation through the development of presuppositional abilities. How the child copes with the social organisation of discourse and thus learns to take part in conversations, is a further aspect of pragmatic development that warrants consideration.

Awareness of discourse structure and involvement in conversational exchanges require the child to function both as a speaker and a listener, assuming the responsibilities of both roles. The child must therefore learn how to function in, and contribute to, such exchanges; he/she must learn how to initiate and maintain topics along with learning how to 'repair' breakdowns in the conversation should they occur.

In addition, according to Grice's Maxims (1975) abridged in Leech (1983), to be a successful conversationalist, it would appear that not only does the child have to learn to be co-operative in the conversation but he/she must also learn to make the contributions informative, relevant, truthful and unambiguous, while being appropriate to the situation and to the partner being spoken to. Implicit in the notion of co-operativeness is the ability to take turns. The development of turn-taking in children is an area that has been widely researched (e.g. Kaye, 1977; Ervin-Tripp 1979). It is to the development of the the ability to turn-take in conversation to which we now turn, before considering the other aspects involved in the development of discourse/conversational abilities.

4.2. Turn-Taking in Conversation:

It is a well established fact that young infants master the rudiments of turntaking long before they use this skill as a conversational device. Early caregiver-infant interactions are typically characterised by turn-taking behaviour, as are the highly ritualised and repetitive games played within those dyads (Bruner 1983). Kaye (1977;89) reports a 'conversation-like' organisation in infant feeding, comparing the burst-pause sequences of infant sucking to turn-taking sequences; though the activities are similar, a direct causal relationship seems remote (see Mc Shane 1980). Snow (1977) describes how mothers often refrain from talking during feeding sessions, especially when the infant has the bottle in his/her mouth, in effect refraining from talking when the infant is prevented from 'answering'. Snow concludes from her study of mother-infant dyads (infants aged 3-24 months), that even from the age of three months, mothers treated their infants as if they were partners in an adult-style conversation. The mothers regarded activities such as smiling, burping and vocalising as constituting the infants turn in the conversation and in so doing'shaping' the infants behaviour towards conversational participation (c.f. Ervin Tripp 1979).

Francis (1990) comments that as a child is 'born a speaker into a world of speakers' it is not surprising that they are treated as such at an early age. As the child grows the mothers or caregivers 'actively induct their infants into conversational participation by continually updating the demands that are made on the infant' (Mc Shane 1980;67). They soon encourage the child to take his own turns and as Garvey (1984) comments this is probably the reason for the very high percentage of questions posed to young children. Children learn early on that a question requires a response and so they attempt to answer even with limited linguistic abilities. Furthermore if they are unable to respond to a proffered turn, children as young as three years may use a turn-holding device such as 'hmm?' or 'yeah', being aware of the obligation to take an offered turn.

Overlapping in conversation, which leads to simultaneous talk, though a common occurrence in adult exchanges, rarely happens when children converse. Garvey (1984) reports only five percent of turns over-lapping in the young children she studied, which decreased to only four percent in older children. She concludes therefore that children observe and are aware of Sacks et al's (1974)'one-speaker-at-a-time' conversational rule.

That young children observe such constraints on turn-taking behaviour, implies that even young preschool children can take turns in an orderly fashion and by school age 'they seem to be following similar processes to adults as far as dyadic interactions are concerned' (Mc Tear 1985a;200). That children's turn taking skills are most effective in dyadic encounters has been further elaborated by Ervin-Tripp (1979), who sees it as being a result of older partners in a communication adapting the level of processing difficulty of their speech to suit their partner (c.f. early caregiver-infant formats). This modification on the part of the adult may not be so easily achieved in triadic or multi-party conversations. In conversations that involve more than two people, the child's turn-taking abilities may prove inadequate. The young child may have difficulty waiting for his/her turn and oftentimes the child will resort to interrupting, in an attempt to take another's turn, frequently offering a contribution that is often seen as irrelevant. That the child's relevance constraints are weak at the early stages of conversational development, often leads to attempts at gaining a turn, being ignored, the child is therefore forced to yield the floor to another conversant.

As Ervin-Tripp (1979) comments, 'relevance must be learned', though at the same time she concludes: 'it is much more evident in our data and perhaps to children that older or more powerful speakers will be listened to regardless of relevance'. (Ervin-Tripp 1979;413) Evidence from the literature on language impairment offers further insights into the conversational turn-taking behaviour of children. However, as Johnston (1985) comments, because of the heterogeneity of language impaired groups it is difficult to make accurate or general conclusions as to the behaviour of these children in conversational exchanges. Such difficulties are represented in the conflicting views on turn-taking skills in such children.

Fey Leonard (1983) offer an interesting insight into the problems of turn-taking in language impaired children, they state: 'a general impairment in comprehension of language form and content may result in the child's assumption of a relatively passive role in conversation' They imply, therefore that though the difficulties in taking turns is manifested pragmatically, the root of the difficulty could be traced to primarily a linguistic cause i.e. poor communication skills; if the child is unable to understand the content of the discourse it follows that he/she would be reluctant to join in. Adams Bishop (1989) found that violation of turn-taking rules was only a feature of some language impaired children when compared to normally speaking controls. Moreover, Craig Evans (1989) found that the turn-taking behaviour was qualitatively different than that of age-matched or language-matched controls.

Blank, Gessner Esposito (1979), in their study of a three year old child whose speech and language skills were age appropriate but who had major problems in using language to communicate, comment that the child as an infant never engaged in the playful preverbal communication patterns so typical of parents and infants. Such games (e.g. peek-a-boo, pat-a-cake etc.) rely on co-operation and turn-taking to be successful. Whether there is a direct causal relationship between a reluctance to engage in such games and later conversational turn-taking difficulties is questionable. Crystal's (1990) description of a 'pragmatically disordered' child shows how the child tended to ignore his listener, and rarely engaged in any form of turn-taking behaviour. However, Mc Tear (1985b) found that turn-taking was not a problem in a young boy he described as presenting with a 'conversational disability'."
4.3
Conversational Initiation:

'As far as conversation is concerned people frequently experience problems when they try to start up a conversation or gain access to one which is already underway'." (Mc Tear 1985a;75)

In the previous section on turn-taking a child's difficulty in gaining access to a conversation, especially in multi-party talk, was discussed. In this section however, the focus is on how a child learns to initiate a conversation - an essential pragmatic skill if the child is to become a competent conversationalist. Mc Tear (1985a;75) defines initiations as 'referring to utterances which predict or set up expectations for responses'." The usual devices used to initiate a conversation are the use of vocatives (e.g. calling a person's name); attention-getting words (e.g. 'hey, 'look','see') or the use of prosodic features (e.g. various intonation contours, increase in volume etc.).

Like other aspects of pragmatic ability, it proves difficult to map the development of conversational initiations in children. However, in section 3.2. we saw that the child as young as nine months can attempt intentional initiations. However, Foster (1979) in Mc Tear (1985a) found that children's early initiations predominantly involved'self topics'," where the child would try to direct attention to himself/herself by crying; the adult would therefore have to find the appropriate response, and if successful the interaction could begin. Furthermore Foster found that such initiations were used (albeit infrequently) by even the youngest children in the sample studied (i.e. ages one month and five months); later development sees the child move from directing attention to objects in the physical environment (e.g. reaching behaviour at age five months) to pointing behaviour (e.g. at age one year and three months) and even later still to the use of attention directing words.

Older children will often use a vocative and an attention getting word e.g. 'Mummy look!' or merely use a vocative with a rising terminal intonation contour. If the former device is used, the listener often responds by saying 'yeah' or 'what', so giving the speaker (e.g. the child) the go ahead to proceed with the discourse now that mutual attention has been secured. A technique commonly used by three or four year olds is the initiation 'know what?' and it gets a similar response pattern to that outlined above. Garvey (1984) constrasts the above with the younger child aged two-three years whose initiations are less sophisticated; children of this age tend to use what Garvey terms 'bare messages' e.g. 'I 'm three to day'or 'This is my doll'." Such attempts at initiation may often prove disconcerting to a stranger 'just because they (the children) have omitted a prior move designed to assume addressee availability' (p.41). The child in the more advances stages of communication development may use full sentences, for example, 'Do you remember that car we saw yesterday?' to initiate an exchange. This more advanced form of initiation sees the child checking out the shared (or given) knowledge before proceeding in the discourse - a technique widely used by parents/caregivers in early communicative situations.

From the language-impairment literature, we can conclude that the pragmatic ability of initiating conversations, seems to be one of the more difficult skills to acquire. Conti-Ramsden and Friel Patti (1983) found that non language impaired children were more inclined to initiate conversations than their language impaired counterparts of the same age. Likewise Fey Leonard (1983) found that specifically language impaired children 'may be markedly deficient as the initiators of social conversational interaction'." Finally Conti-Ramsden Gunn (1986) in their case study of a 'conversationally disabled' child, showed that the initiation devices such as those described above did not appear until the age of 5.2 - 5.7 years.

In summary, therefore, though we can see stages in the development of conversational initiation, especially in the younger preverbal child, it is difficult to rank the various initiating devices in terms of their complexity and acquisition. Moreover again because of the heterogeneity of the language impaired group, it is not possible to make a general statement on the development of initiations in such children.
4.4.
Conversational Maintenance:

If initiating a conversational exchange is a difficult enough task for a child to achieve, maintaining the conversation, once initiated, also poses problems for the young communicator. As adults, the techniques we employ in our efforts to maintain conversations, include such techniques as answering questions asked or adding some new or further information to the topic being discussed. Verbal techniques may also include utterances like 'yeah', 'uh-huh', 'is that so?' etc. (which can function also as turn-holding devices, as we saw earlier). Non-verbally we use head nods and facial expressions which should (but may not always) encourage the speaker to continue. Such devices are also known as 'Back-Channel Communication Devices' and oftentimes adults use them unconsciously. Mc Tear (1985a) cites an example, taken from Sinclair Coulthard (1975), of how adults (in this case a teacher) maintain topics.
