• 沒有找到結果。

General Pictures for the two dyads’ Interactions

Chapter 5 Discussions

5.2 General Pictures for the two dyads’ Interactions

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was about to change topics. As for LIN’s mother, less interest for attention devices might be attributed to the motivation of controlling the child’s physical actions rather than maintain the child’s focus.

In sum, the present study presents ways how maternal interactional styles interacted with the dyads’ topic maintenance. To echo the research question brought out in section 1.2, the data suggested that for a dyad with a directive mother, continuing of

conversations was more likely to be overlooked due to the mother’s intention of controlling the child’s physical behaviors. For a dyad with a conversation-eliciting mother, maintaining of interactions, particularly topic maintaining, was of great concern and reflected by the mother’s continuous elicitations. Considering maternal language inputs and child language development, investigations of the data also revealed that while the mother’s influence on the child was examined, possibilities of the child’s influence on the mother should also be taken into considerations. This finding is thus conformed to Yoder and Kaiser (1989)’s study in which a bidirectional influence model of social interactions was proposed.

5.2 General Pictures for the two dyads’ Interactions

In this section, a general picture for each dyad’s interaction is depicted in terms of topic-maintenance. As mentioned above, regarding the two dyads’ interactions at the conversational parameter level, LIN’s dyad maintained shorter topic episode and changed topic frequently, and LJW’s dyad maintained longer topic episode and changed topic less frequently. After closely investigating the data and going beyond the basic analytic unit, namely topic episode, we came up with a general picture of interaction for each dyad.

Interaction of LIN’s dyad is presented in the following figure:

Figure 4 General Picture of Interaction for LIN’s dyad

In figure 4, the square represents topic episode and the ellipsis represents topic change.

The figure illustrated that short topic episodes were often found in LIN’s dyad’s conversational interaction. In addition, due to LIN’s mother’s frequent topic change, situations where topics introduced by LIN’s mother were changed by herself before it was continued by LIN were also common in the data, represented by the successive ellipses without any intermediate square. Besides short topic episode and frequent topic change, figure 4 also suggested that the conversational interaction of LIN’s dyad was scattered in a way that the whole conversation consisted of short topic episodes that were apart from the others, utterances with topics which were not maintained by the other participants, and topic-changing utterances. Such a configuration could be explained by LIN’s mother’s intention of directing or controlling LIN’s physical behaviors in the ongoing conversational exchange.

In the other way, picture of LJW’s dyad’s interaction is presented in figure 5:

Short Topic

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Figure 5 General Picture of Interaction for LJW’s dyad

Contrary to LIN’s dyad, long topic episodes and seldom topic change were found in the conversational interaction of LJW’s dyad. When new topics were introduced by LJW’s mother, they were usually kept continued by LJW’s mother till they were successfully maintained by LJW. Besides long topic episodes and seldom topic change, this figure suggested a neat structure for the whole conversation of LJW’s dyad, consisting of topic episodes that were adjacent to others, and topic changing utterances that ended old topic episodes and opened new topic episode at the same time. Based on the results of

conversational behaviors presented in the previous section, such a configuration could be related to LJW’s mother’s constant elicitations in the conversational interaction.

Long Topic Episode

Long Topic Episode

Time Progression Topic

Change

Topic Change

Long Topic Episode

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Chapter 6 Conclusion

In this chapter, remarks about maternal interactional styles revealed in this study and its relationship to the topic maintenance in the mother-child interaction are presented in section 6.1. Section 6.2 discusses the limitation of our study and suggestion for future research.

6.1 Concluding Remarks

As pointed out by McDonald and Pien (1982), determination of maternal underlying intention would be inferable from patterning of illocutionary acts of mothers. In our study, by investigating the illocutionary force and conversational characteristics of the two Mandarin-speaking mothers’ utterances, their underlying intentions were revealed. While LIN’s mother’s conversational behaviors were found to be more directive and tended to direct or control LIN’s physical behaviors, LJW’s mother’s conversational behaviors were found to be more conversation-eliciting and tented to engage LJW in the conversations.

Investigations of the communicative intents in topic-maintaining utterances showed that LIN and LJW displayed similar communicative capacities. Provided with their mother’s elicitations, they were capable of maintaining different types of discourse topic in a variety of context. Regarding the two dyads’ conversational interactions, LIN’s dyad maintained topic episode with less speaking turns, and LJW’s dyad maintained topic episode with more speaking turns. In addition, while LIN and LJW changed topics with a similar frequency, LIN’ mother changed topic much more often than LJW’s mother.

Results in our study also revealed that there seemed to be a cluster of conversational

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behaviors for each mother and the dyad. While the mother had more intention to direct and control the child’s physical behaviors, frequently changed topics, and maintained shorter topic episodes in LIN’s dyad, the mother had more intention to elicit the child’s conversational participations, seldom changed topics, and maintained longer topic episodes in LJW’s dyad. Contrary to McDonald and Pien (1982)’s findings, appealing to attention devices, particularly when changing topics, was observed in LJW’s mother’s utterances. Although McDonald and Pien (1982) pointed out that it was unnecessary for a conversation-eliciting mother to resort to attention devices, difficulties for the child to maintain topics seemed to be the motivation for a conversation-eliciting mother to ensure the child’s attention by resorting to attention devices. Finally, picturing of the general configuration for each dyad’s whole conversation illustrated a scattered picture for LIN’s dyad and a neat picture for LJW’s dyad, respectively.

In sum, our study provided a way in which the interaction of maternal speech styles and topic-maintenance was investigated in Mandarin mother-child conversational

interaction. We hope that this study could pave a way for future studies regarding relationships between maternal interactional styles and the child’s communicative competences.

6.2 Limitations and Suggestions

In McDonald and Pien’s (1982) study, it was suggested that the mother’s

conversational behaviors might changed with the child’s growing age and competences.

Recognizing such a possibility for instability of the mother’s conversational behavior, Olsen-Fulero’s (1982) thus proposed that cross-time stability be considered before maternal interactional styles are determined. In our study, data examined was located at a

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single point of the child’s age6. If the same analysis could be conducted with the same subjects at a later point of time, whether the two mothers’ distinct interactional styles are stable across times or not would be clarified and the interaction of maternal interactional styles and topic-maintenance in conversational interactions would be further evidenced.

In addition, activities and contexts of the conversation could also influence the two mothers’ speech, affecting results of the maternal interacitonal styles. If activities and contexts could be almost equally distributed, distinguishing of maternal interacitonal styles would be more convincing. In addition, we suggest that more dyads be studied for the relationships between maternal interactional styles and mother-child topic

maintenance.

6 Around 3 year-old.

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Appendix: CHAT Symbols

Period .

Questions ?

Exclamation !

Trailing off +…

Interruption +/.

Quick Uptake +^

Self-completion +,

Other-completion ++

Quotation Mark [’’]

Best Guess [?]

Explanation [=]

Overlapping Utterances [>][<]

Retracing without Correction [/]

Retracing with Correction [//]

Unintelligible Speech xxx

Untranscribed Material www

Pause #

Action without Speech 0

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