Children Communicating

The First 5 Years

Beth Bonniwell Haslett, Wendy Samter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Offering a unique focus on the development of human communication, this book integrates and synthesizes a more comprehensive array of research than most investigations of communicative development. As such, it incorporates materials dealing with the development of nonverbal communication, language, and cognition, and examines how they are integrated in the growing child's everyday interaction. This information is distilled into a set of key principles and practices--culled from a variety of fields including developmental and social psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and communication--for parents or adults interested in child development. While this book does not offer an in-depth view in any one area, it provides a comprehensive overview of the various components of human communicative development and its significance for the child's cognitive and emotional growth. It is quite clear that developmental processes are constrained by multiple influences whose interactions have just begun to be uncovered. Examining the diverse facets of communicative development will enable professionals to garner further insights into the mystery of human communication.

1

Basic Concepts: Communication, Cognition, and Language

One of our most intriguing scientific puzzles is trying to understand how children learn to communicate. In what may seem a mysterious fashion, children acquire the rudiments of communication by age 2—without being explicitly taught. So widespread is this developmental phenomenon, in fact, that the age of 2 years is frequently used as a rough benchmark of whether children are developing normally.

How children learn to communicate is the focus of this book. Communicative development has been studied in a wide array of disciplines and from different theoretical perspectives. The role of cognition, social relationships, and language in communication and how they interrelate and influence one another present complex scientific and human puzzles. As we investigate these issues, we confront major debates in social science, including such issues as biological predispositions versus environmental influences, continuity versus discontinuity in development, and the functionality of developmental changes.

Before we begin, however, it is necessary to lay out some fundamental assumptions that underlie our perspective on communicative development and therefore shape the way in which the information in this book is presented. First, we believe that the development of communication is intertwined with the development of language and cognition: Communication is the context in which language and cognition develop. People need support from others to survive, and this compels us to communicate, to learn language to master the environment and interact with others. Through language and social interaction, people express their desires, explore the world, and cooperate with others.

Communication, in turn, becomes more precise, abstract, and complex as a result of both increasing skill and cognitive ability. Communicating with others is also the context in which people integrate their linguistic and cognitive abilities to influence others and to achieve goals. Increasing linguistic knowledge enables people to communicate in many ways, such as asking questions, giving directions, and conducting arguments. As individuals mature cognitively, they are able to recognize and cope with an increasingly complex physical and social world. Cognitive activity (thinking, perceiving, interpreting, and reasoning) is based on information, especially feedback, that we receive from others during interactions with them.

Throughout this book, we emphasize the interplay of language, cognition, and social relationships in the development of communication. No single component alone can account for children’s unfolding communicative abilities. Rather, at any given point in time, language, cognition, and social relationships interact and mutually influence one another as well as influencing youngsters’ communicative behaviors. The nature of these interactions varies across time. The particular facets of language, cognition, and social relationships that combine to enable children to utter their first words are different from the configuration of linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that influence the ways in which they develop and maintain friendships.

Our review focuses primarily on research conducted in Western countries. Cultures vary in terms of the communicative channels they emphasize, the ways in which they view children, and the interactional behaviors they endorse and sanction. In chapter 9, which deals with parenting principles, we introduce some cross-cultural differences in communication values and parenting styles. Although a full examination of this research is well beyond the scope of our book, a plentiful literature exists concerning cross-cultural variations in family practices and ethnic differences in family styles within the United States.

Finally, a word about our organization is in order. Our chapters are sequenced to reflect the developmental progression in which children’s communicative skills emerge. Thus, our discussion of nonverbal communication precedes our chapter on language development because children learn to communicate via nonverbal channels before they understand how to use language to make their intentions clear. This organizational framework, however, is not meant to imply that the areas we cover develop in isolation from one another. For example, youngsters acquire reciprocity and turn taking largely through the nonverbal interactions they experience with caretakers during the first 12 months of life. In this way, early exchanges not only facilitate the development of nonverbal behaviors that promote interaction throughout a child’s first year but simultaneously lay the foundation for verbal skills children employ in their later conversations. Nor do we intend for our organizational framework to suggest that the communicative elements we discuss are actually used separately. In the real world, communication occurs on many levels and uses multiple cues simultaneously. With these caveats in mind, let us turn to a brief survey of the chapters in this book.

The book begins with an overview of our basic assumptions about communication, language, and cognition. We also highlight the implications of these assumptions for the study of communicative development. The next four chapters cover the major communication systems. In chapter 2, we discuss nonverbal communication, infants’ earliest form of communication. Babies are born with well-developed visual and auditory perceptual systems. These biological capacities “prewire” them for interaction with adults and, therefore, help ensure their survival. As language develops, it enables greater clarity in young children’s communication and allows them to talk about past and future events. Relevant stages in children’s acquisition of language are presented in chapter 3. As both the nonverbal and linguistic systems mature, they enhance children’s communicative abilities as well as their capacity to achieve goals and develop relationships with others: Two chapters cover the development of communication skills and the underlying knowledge that makes these skills possible. In chapter 4, we examine youngsters’ increasing mastery of conversations and their growing ability to introduce and sustain topics, enter ongoing activities of their peer group, engage others in play, and manage conflict. Chapter 5 explores how children’s increasingly sophisticated knowledge of self, others, and social relationships allows them to use this knowledge and these skills appropriately in context. For developing children, both skill and knowledge are necessary for effective communication.

Whereas the early chapters survey the basic elements of communication and how they develop, the following chapters deal with the critical contexts in which development emerges. Two major developmental contexts include family and friends. We explore the family as a developmental context in chapter 6. Mothers, fathers, and siblings provide important models for communicative behaviors, shape youngsters’ social and emotional development, and impart significant lessons about self and others. The family is also a key context for learning the values of the larger culture as well as appropriate sex-role behaviors. As discussed in chapters 7 and 8, different but equally important lessons are acquired from peers. Although adults can adapt and accommodate to children’s perspectives, peers typically cannot. Thus, friendship is a meeting ground for equals who, together, must negotiate the terms of their interactions and their relationships. Friendship also provides a context in which children can compare themselves with similar others as well as develop and refine important communication skills such as conflict management.

In our final chapter, “Parenting: Principles and Practices,” we try to condense essential lessons for parents from the breadth of social science research covered in this book. The developmental consequences of the first 5 years have lifelong implications, and we hope that our suggestions help parents and other adults navigate this challenge with insight and preparation.

Even this brief overview shows the fascination and complexity of communication. In our coverage of communicative development, we incorporate research from several disciplines, encompass a wide array of methodologies, and discuss many developmental issues and controversies, in both current research and classic studies such as early work on facial expressions and attachment.

Throughout, we emphasize the first 5 years as the time in which critical communication skills are developed. These skills have consequences for people’s entire lives in terms of relationships, self-esteem, and interactional competence. The book title should perhaps state “the first 5 years … and a whole lot more,” for lifelong consequences flow from the communicative patterns and activities established during children’s first 5 years.

In what follows, we present our beliefs and assumptions about the nature of communication, language, and cognition and discuss how these assumptions shape our study of children’s communicative development.

Basic Concepts: Communication, Language, and Cognition

Communication

Although everyone communicates, this everyday activity is complex and not easily defined. No single definition or explanatory concept comprehensively captures the complexity of communication, but some conceptualizations are more useful than others. Among the most satisfactory definitions of communication is that of Albert Scheflen (1972, 1974), a noted scholar in nonverbal communication. Scheflen defined communication as an organized, standardized, culturally patterned system of behavior that sustains, regulates, and makes possible human relationships.

Scheflen’s view implies several underlying assumptions. First, communication is a socially shared activity that allows humans to develop relationships with each other. Second, communication is multimodal; it incorporates verbal, paralinguistic, and nonverbal channels. Although verbal communication relies on language as its symbolic code, nonverbal communication has many codes, such as proxemics (use of space), movement, posture, facial expression, eye gaze, gesture, touch, smell, and territoriality (personal space). Of special interest are the paralinguistic codes like pitch, stress, intonation, and juncture (pausing) which accompany speech. Because the focus of this book is on communicative growth in the first 5 years of life, we give special attention to facial expression, paralinguistics, eye gaze, touch, gesture, and their development; these appear to be the most significant nonverbal communication systems early in life.

Other assumptions include communication’s structured nature, which is not random but purposeful and goal directed. Communication patterns also vary from culture to culture, incorporating both linguistic and nonverbal differences. Finally, communication is generally a conventional (standardized) process: Although human communication varies substantially from person to person, both the formulation and the interpretation of messages rely upon conventionally agreed-upon, socially shared meanings.

Communication is thus an interactive process that requires a message sender (encoder) and a message interpreter (decoder). In order for meaningful interaction to take place, both speakers and hearers must share common interpretive assumptions. For interactants, these common principles of interpretation acknowledge that communication is:

• inferential
• intentional
• conventional
• jointly negotiated between speakers and hearers
• varies according to context and language user
• involves commonsense knowledge
• sequential
• accomplished in real time and space
• systematic
• interpretive, and
• varies according to the participants’ social relationships.

These concepts or assumptions are developed later, and we pay particular attention to the ways various research traditions dealt with the study of each concept. Citing different scholars, however, does not imply that researchers used these concepts in identical ways. Rather, we incorporate these views to illustrate some commonalities underlying the concepts and to demonstrate their centrality in various approaches to studying communication and its development.

Inferences

Inferences are the implicit meanings humans assign to objects and events; meanings develop on the basis of what is said (through presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and so on), on the basis of context, and on the basis of commonsense knowledge. Cicourel (1980) defined inferences as the “tacit ways in which we link information from different sources to create coherency and relevance in our speech acts and nonverbal and paralinguistic actions” (p. 117). Interestingly, Cicourel explicitly linked verbal and nonverbal communication as sources of inference making.

Speech act models rely on inferential processes because an utterance’s illocutionary force is inferred from the social action accomplished by that spoken utterance. Grice (1975, 1978) suggested that interactants constructed plausible rationales to support one interpretation over another by using conventional meanings, the Cooperative Principle, conversational maxims, and contextual knowledge. Similar views were expressed by Bach and Harnish (1979), who argued that inferences reflected the participants’ analysis of a given social context, their assessment of others’ intentions, and the specific language used. Dimitracopoulou (1990) suggested that multiple considerations, such as context, intentions, social cognitive knowledge, and linguistic form, interact simultaneously to form one’s inferences about what is going on; these inferences change across conversational settings and over time.

Young children appear to develop inferential skills slowly over the first 5 years. Many of their early inferences appear to be based on conventional meanings embedded in situations, and they associate certain actions and behaviors with specific settings or individuals. Later, more complex inferences about others, their behaviors, and rationales for their behavior develop. Over time, as children’s egocentrism lessens, they are able to develop inferences reflecting differences among individuals and across varied contexts.

Intentionality

Most communication scholars have agreed that communication, as a social act, is inherently intentional (Berger & Bradac, 1982; Tracy, 1991; van Dijk, 1980). Despite this common view, there is little agreement on how to conceptualize or measure intentionality. Unresolved questions, such as the degree to which individuals consciously plan their communication, the degree of cognitive monitoring humans are capable of, and the degree to which humans can accurately report their intentions, present serious intellectual and theoretical challenges.

Three recent approaches to intentionality appear to have important implications for communication research. One approach, taken by Searle (1983), Shotter (1993), and others, views communicative behavior as motivated by the need for social communion and cooperation. People’s intentions, from birth, are driven by these basic social needs. Another approach views communicative purposes as tied to issues of social control and influence, whether over our own behavior (Langer, 1983) or over a relationship (Rogers, 1983).

A third approach, taken by researchers in artificial intelligence, views intentionality as goal seeking; people act to accomplish some goal. Parisi and Castelfranchi (1981) defined a goal as a state that regulates an individual’s behavior. Douglas (1970), following in the tradition of Schutz and Husserl, argued that “it is primarily intentions at any time—our purposes at hand—that order human thought, that determine the relevance of information and ideas about the world and ourselves” (p. 26). In conversation, speakers and hearers must adopt at least one common goal: At a minimum, they converse with each other. Some researchers, however, have suggested that communicative encounters are shaped by multiple goals. For example, constructivists have argued that people enter conversation with the purpose of doing something; conversational participants have instrumental or task goals they wish to accomplish via their interactions with one another (see Burleson, 1987; Clark & Delia, 1979; O’Keefe & Delia, 1982). Instrumental goals can vary; people enter conversation for any number of purposes including persuading, comforting, regulating another’s behavior, or simply “shooting the breeze.” Constructivists have also maintained, however, that in addition to these instrumental purposes, interactants have identity needs, image or presentational goals, and relational concerns that they wish to have acknowledged. According to Tracy and Craig (1983), communicative goals involve a listener’s acknowledgment and adoption of a specific identity and presentational and relational concerns. (For an excellent discussion of the role of goals in communication and problems with linking goals and discourse, see Tracy, 1991.)

Whatever particular viewpoint they advocate, researchers have acknowledged the fundamental importance of intentionality in any theory of communication. Much greater conceptual clarity is needed in order to delineate assumptions about intentionality and to ascertain “what counts” as evidence of intentionality, especially in early developmental contexts such as infancy. In particular, scholars must differentiate between goals and means or motives and the realization of those motives.

Although intentionality is a taken-for-granted characteristic of communication, there is considerable debate over its conceptualization and measurement. A key assumption in communicative development is that adults or caretakers assume that young children’s utterances have an intended meaning. The assumption of intended meaning reinforces the importance of communication to children and enhances their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Basic Concepts: Communication, Cognition, and Language
• 2 Nonverbal Communication: Its Origins and Development
• 3 The Development of Language
• 4 Developing Verbal Communication
• 5 Developing Communicative Knowledge
• 6 Family Influences on Communicative and Social Development
• 7 Conceptions of Friendship: A Developmental Perspective
• 8 Doing Friendship
• 9 Parenting: Principles and Practices
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index