Acquiring conversational competence

Elinor Ochs, Bambi B. Schieffelin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315401607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1983, this book represents a substantial body of detailed research on children's language and communication, and more generally on the nature of interactive spoken discourse. It looks at areas of competence often examined in young children's speech have that have not been described for adults — leading to insights not only in the character of adult conversation but also the process of acquiring this competence. The authors set forward strategies for conversing at different stage of life, while also relating these strategies to, and formulating hypotheses concerning, the dynamics of language variation and change.

Part I
Constructing conversation

1
Conversational competence in children¹

E. Ochs Keenan

1.1 Introduction

This paper examines the development of communication skills in young children. It focuses, in particular, on the emergence of skills that underlie the exchange of talk. Any child who learns to speak has interacted with other members of the society. Before he utters a single word of the adult language, he is able to respond to the social overtures of others (Bruner, 1975; Escalona, 1973; Richards, 1971). Escalona finds that even in the first month of life, a child responds to the presence of another by gazing, smiling and/or vocalizing. As a child matures, he is able to engage in reciprocal games, such as peek-boo (after five months), to comply with requests and/or answer questions (eleventh month) and independently initiate interactions by expressing a wish or demand, by showing or giving things to people. The emergence of speech in a child must be seen in the context of these social skills.

How, then, do children use language in interacting with others? In what sense are they able to produce and respond appropriately to requests, invitations, greetings, summons, insults, narratives, comments? In what sense are they able to maintain a sustained and coherent dialogue? Questions such as these have been posed by Bloom (1970), Ervin-Tripp (1973), Halliday (1973), Hymes (1972b) and Ryan (1972, 1974) among others. Discussion of these questions draws primarily from observations of adult (usually the mother)-child interactions. This paper hopes to broaden the scope of these observations to include child-child interaction.

1.2 Method

Since September 1973, observations of the speech of two children have been made. The children are my own twin boys, Toby and David, age 2; 9 at onset of research. Initially, the conversations of the children were recorded on an audio recorder. From 22 October, a video recorder was used. This equipment was then used once a month over a period of a year.

The bulk of our observations of the children’s conversations take place in the children’s bedroom in the early morning hours. This setting was selected as it provided a locus where the children speak to one another outside the presence of any adult. One of the focal interests of this research is to examine how children maintain a dialogue on their own. Twins, in general, are particularly interesting in this respect as neither is linguistically more sophisticated than the other. In terms of their communicative competence, both share roughly the same level of development. The children have also been recorded interacting with adults (nanny, parent) and with another child approximately the same age (2;10).

1.3 The problem defined

We now turn to the conversations held by Toby and David when on their own. Our primary interest is in investigating the ways in which these children co-operate in talk. This focus presupposes that young children do engage in meaningful, sustained talk-exchanges. It opposes the Piagetian view (1926) that children tend not to address or adapt their speech to a co-present listener. The high percentage of egocentric language (47 per cent for one child, 43 per cent for a second child) observed by Piaget is not characteristic of early morning dialogue between Toby and David. For example, in the conversation of 15 September 1973, of 257 conversational turns (one or more utterances bounded by long pauses or by the utterances of another speaker), only 17 or 6.6 per cent appear to be unequivocally not addressed or adapted particularly to the co-present interlocutor. Of these turns, seven involve the construction of a narrative, three involve speech addressed to a toy animal, and seven involve songs and sound play. The narratives appear to be addressed to some imaginary interlocutor or to some audience, which may include the co-present child but not him exclusively. This shift in audience is signalled by a shift in voice quality by the speaker. Generally, narratives are marked by greater loudness in contrast to the immediately preceding utterances. The speaker appears to be talking to an interlocutor who stands some distance away.

The division of speech into egocentric and social, private and public, and the like, is riddled with difficulties. What one investigator may call egocentric or private another may call social or public. For example, Piaget considers utterances which repeat an immediately previous utterance as non-adaptive and egocentric, whereas I consider repetitions as highly social in intent! (The argument for this classification is to be discussed below.) I would like to discard this dichotomy in favour of an approach that considers talk-exchanges in terms of a speaker’s expectations and a hearer’s obligations (Schegloff, 1968; Goffman, 1971).

Two interlocutors who wish to communicate with one another are faced with what Lewis (1969) calls a co-ordination problem. To interact effectively, they need to share not only a linguistic code, but also a code of conduct. That is to say, interlocutors need to establish a loose set of conversational conventions. These conventions establish certain expectations on the part of speaker and hearer. For example, speaker-hearers may establish speech conventions concerning turn-taking, points of interruption, audibility. These expectations cut across all types of dialogue. Other expectations may be tied to particular utterance types. A speaker producing utterance X may expect a particular sort of verbal/non-verbal response from a hearer. That is, the speaker expects the hearer to recognize the speaker’s utterance as a certain kind of talk and expects the hearer to respond in a manner appropriate to that talk. Generally, if the hearer recognizes the category of talk offered by the speaker and if he responds in the manner appropriate to that talk, then we can say that the hearer has satisfied the speaker and that the talk-exchange is a ‘happy’ one.

Let us illustrate this principle of the happy exchange. One category of utterance which occurs frequently in the dialogues between Toby and David is the comment. Comment is a term used by Bloom (1970) to refer to utterances that describe some ongoing activity or some activity about to be performed in the immediate future. Comments also name or point out co-present objects. Applied to the dialogue at hand, comments also include descriptions of the state or condition of objects and persons.

1.3.1 Examples of comments²

1. Descriptions of on-going activity:	I got feathers/ I got/ I got big one/ I rip it now/
2. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Constructing conversation
• Part II Using discourse and syntax to express propositions
• Part III Cross-cultural perspectives on caregiver-child communication
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index