Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 Refusal and gender
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students with lower IQs. Therefore, the author suggested that teachers should encourage less popular and lower-IQ students to show more politeness in their refusals in order to improve their personal relationships.
Both the literature concerning children’s conflict talk and refusals provide us some knowledge about children’s refusal production. Previous studies have investigated children of different age groups, from one year old to elementary school age. The results showed that children’s refusal strategies become more complex and indirect when children grow older. Children shift from mainly rely on simple negation to various indirect strategies such as reason, alternatives, or postponement, etc.
Besides, children’s refusal is found to be sensitive to social factors such as gender or social status. Although several studies have been conducted to examine the refusal production by Mandarin-speaking children, the data collection method – using cartoons or questionnaires to elicit refusals – is limiting and may bias the results.
Since the situations were not authentic, the results may not accurately reflect children’s real-life performance in making refusals.
2.3 Refusal and gender
As mentioned previously, research on conflict talk and refusal are closely related.
In many studies related to refusals or conflict talk among children, it was found that boys and girls perform differently. Farris (2000) analyzed the cross-sex peer conflict
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in a Mandarin Chinese-speaking preschool in Taiwan. There were four classes in the preschool: Youyouban, Xiaoban, Zhongban, and Daban. The children were aged from 2;6 to 6;6, with Youyouban having the youngest children, followed by Xiaoban, Zhongban, and finally Daban. The naturally occurring conversations in each class were videotaped for analysis. The results showed that conflict occurs as frequently in
cross-sex interaction as in boy-boy interaction. Moreover, Chinese girls also used the
“aggravated” style of conflict talk in the cross-sex conflict, which is associated in the
literature with a masculine sex-typed style. The author believed that this kind of subversion showed that Chinese girls were trying to attain a new position in the rapidly changing society of modern Taiwan in which females have more autonomy and power. From the cross-sex peer conflict, it was also found that certain children identified as peer leaders were doing the borderwork to establish gender boundaries.
Therefore, the author argued in the end that one way of constructing gender is via cross-sex conflicts.
Yang (2003) investigated the influence of age, gender, and sociolinguistic background on preschool and elementary school children’s refusal strategies. In terms of gender, the results revealed that female children generated more words when refusing. In addition, they applied more strategies and more indirect refusals than male children. They used more instances of alternatives, avoidance, and adjuncts than
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male children. The author concluded that female children had better refusal skills and that they are more polite than male children. Similar results were found in Yang’s (2004) research on elementary school children’s refusal production. It was found that compared with boys, girls favor showing politeness in refusing people of all kinds of social rankings.
Some studies examined the influence of culture on gender differences. Kyratzis and Guo (2001) analyzed the conflict talk of American children and that of Chinese children from China. They used their results to argue against the separate world hypothesis. The Separate World Hypothesis (Maltz & Borker, 1982) states that as the result of separated peer play in childhood in which girls play predominately with other girls and boys play with other boys, the two genders develop different communicative styles. Boys also seem to speak more directly and forcefully, they are more likely to focus on themselves, and they are more assertive. Kyratzis and Guo
pointed out that although research on American children supported the separate world hypothesis, the research with Chinese children had challenged the view of girls’
language as cooperative. The results showed that in same-sex talk, American boys and Chinese girls used the most direct strategies, including third party compliant and censures and aggravated commands. American girls used the most mitigated strategies, and Chinese boys used a combination of direct and indirect strategies. The authors
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provided some possible explanations for the results. One was that Chinese females use more assertive strategies because they are licensed to be powerful in certain contexts, such as in the discussion of moral norms. Another possibility is explained by
the differences in the ways groups are formed and maintained in peer interaction. In China, the group boundary is more solid since “interdependent construal of the self” is
culturally valued. Chinese girls can afford more direct and aggravated strategies, and Chinese boys do not need a hierarchical group structure; therefore, they used more mitigated conflict strategies. In cross-sex conflicts, the results indicated contextual complexity in the use of conflict strategies in both cultures. Both the theme of the interaction and the boy-girl ratio influence children’s choice of strategies.
As observed in the previous studies, gender is an important factor that influences children’s choice of refusal strategies and their conflict talk. It is found that
boys and girls tend to use different refusal strategies. However, the results found in the previous studies were not consistent. Some suggested that girls used more indirect strategies than boys while some discovered that girls used more direct strategies. The difference in methodology, for example, the way data was collected, may cause the difference. In addition, the literature revealed that culture is also an important issue when discussing gender differences. Therefore, in our study, instead of using questionnaires to obtain data, we used natural conversations to analyze children’s
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refusal production. We aim to discover how speaker’s and interlocutor’s gender influence children’s choice of refusal strategies and find out if our results confirm or contradict the previous findings.
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Chapter 3
Methodology
3.1 Subjects and data
The subjects of this study were preschoolers aged 4;7 to 5;10 (mean: 5;4). The children in this age range were chosen because previously studies suggested that children learned the rules for friendly interaction from their peers during the time period, approximately from age 5 to 15. In addition, many previous studies related to children’s conflict talk or refusals have examined children within this age period and various strategies were found to be used by children (Eisenberg and Garvey, 1981;
Wang, 2007). Therefore, choosing children in this age range should help us to discover various refusal strategies and how they use these strategies to show unwillingness and keep a friendly interaction at the same time.
There were two sets of data in our study. Some were collected in Wanxing Kindergarten in Taipei. The students in Wanxing Kindergarten were divided into two mixed-age classes. Three girls and three boys were chosen from one of the classes to be videotaped. These children knew each other well and often played together. They all came from middle class families, and their parents had high educational backgrounds with university or advanced degrees. Children were divided into same-
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and mixed-gender dyads and triads. During the play time in the kindergarten, one of the groups was asked to play freely in a spare classroom full of different toys. The interaction between children was videotaped. The length of the data collected each time varied from 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how the children interacted. The total length of the conversations equals about seven hours.
The other data were collected in a daycare center in Taipei. The subjects were two girls and one boy. They also knew each other well. The interactions between these children were videotaped. As with the children in Wanxing Kindergarten, they were playing with toys most of the time during the observation. The length of the data
varied from 30 to 60 minutes. The total length of the data is approximately four hours.
Because of the similarity in the subjects’ ages, their relationships, and the
activities taking place during videotaping, both sets of data were used for analysis.
When videotaping, the observer did not interfere with the children’s interaction.
Therefore, the data collected is quite natural. Spontaneous speech to be examined in this study belongs to the Language Acquisition Lab of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics of NCCU, directed by Dr. Chiung-chih Huang.
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The information about subjects is provided in table 1.
Table 1. Subjects’ gender and age at recording
Subject Gender Age at recording
LIN Girl 5;7
3.2 Procedures of data analysis
The data collected were first transcribed in the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcriptions) format. Refusals in the data were then identified. A refusal is a responding act in which the speaker refuses to engage in an action proposed by the interlocutor. Although the initiating acts being refused include requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions, only refusals responding to requests were examined in this study. After identifying the refusals, the refusals were further coded according to the refusal categories listed in 3.3. When a refusal contained more than one strategy, each strategy was counted separately. Therefore, the number of refusal strategy tokens is more than the number of refusals.
After the data were all coded, about one fourth of the data were coded by another
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coder who is familiarized with the coding system. The inter-rater reliability was then evaluated with the Cohen’s kappa value. The Cohen’s kappa coefficient indicates that the inter-rater reliability is very high (k= 0.88).
3.3 Coding categories
The coding categories proposed by Beebe et al. (1990) were adapted for data analysis. Some refusal strategies that never appeared in children’s data were omitted,
and some other strategies were added to better fit the data. The strategies are classified into two categories: direct and indirect. The direct refusal includes simple negation and physical force. The indirect refusal strategies are citing negated ability, giving reasons, offering alternatives, dissuading the interlocutor, making counterclaims, conditional acceptance, verbal avoidance, and nonverbal avoidance. The strategies are defined below:
A. Simple negation
Simple negation means that children use direct denial of compliance without reservation. The most commonly used lexical items are 不要 buyao ‘no’ or 不行 buxing ‘no’.
B. Physical force
Children do not only refuse verbally. They sometimes appeal to physical force such as grabbing or hitting to show noncompliance.
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C. Negated ability
This refers to utterances that show inability to comply with the interlocutor’s
request. Utterances such as 我不會送(餐) wo buhui song(can) ‘I can’t deliver (the meal)’ belong in this category.
D. Reason
This refers to the explanations or justifications given by the speaker for noncompliance. Examples like 這是我的 zhe shi wode ‘This is mine’ or 我不喜歡送 信 wo bu xihuan song xin ‘I don’t like to deliver a mail’ are included in this category.
E. Alternative
Alternative refers to the utterances suggesting a different course of action.
Utterances such as 大家一起(做) dajia yiqi “Let’s do it togother” after the request 你 做軌道 ni zuo guidao ‘you build the track’ are classified as alternatives. The refuser
shows noncompliance by suggesting an alternative related to the request.
F. Counterclaim
A counterclaim happens when the speaker refuses the request by repeating the interlocutor’s plan of action as the speaker’s own plan of action. For example, when a
requester wanted a certain toy and made a request 給我 gei wo “Give it to me,” the refuser used the same utterance 給我 gei wo “Give it to me” as his own request in order to show noncompliance.
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G. Conditional acceptance
This refers to the utterances which indicate that the refusee’s plan of action will be
accepted under certain conditions. For instance, when the child asked for a block, the refuser responded 那你還我一個 na ni huan wo yige “Then you have to give me one back” to indicate that the request would not be accepted until the condition was met.
H. Dissuade interlocutor
This type of refusal attempts to persuade the refusee to give up his or her action plan. Threats or statements of negative consequences, guilt trips (pointing out things the refusee failed to do in the past), criticizing, and asking for rewards are methods the refuser employs to dissuade the interlocutor. For example, when one child said that he wanted to ride the horse, the refuser responded 你騙人 ni pian ren ‘You lied to me’ because the requester had promised that he would not touch the toy horse. The
refuser criticized the requester in hopes of persuading him to give up the request.
I. Avoidance — verbal
This refers to utterances that avoid a direct response to a proposed course of action.
Postponement such as 等一下 dengyixia “wait a minute” and changing the topic are included in this category.
J. Avoidance — nonverbal
The speaker sometimes uses nonverbal avoidance as a way of refusing. For
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instance, they may remain silent, concentrate on doing something, or walk away from the interlocutor. No verbal response is provided at all.
Figure 1. Framework of refusal analysis Refusal
Direct Simple negation
Physical force
Indirect
Negated ability Reason
Alternative Counterclaim
Conditional Acceptance
Dissuade interlocutor
Verbal avoidance
Nonverbal avoidance
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Chapter 4
Data Analysis
4.1 Children’s use of refusal strategies
The data show a total of 222 refusals in 11 hours of observation. The frequency of refusals was 20.2 per hour. In terms of directness, children tended to apply indirect strategies when refusing others. Table 2 illustrates the frequency of the use of direct
and indirect refusals.
Table 2. Frequency of direct and indirect strategies
Direct/ Indirect strategy Number of tokens Percentage (%)
Direct refusal 83 32.55
Indirect refusal 172 67.45
Total 255 100
The frequency of the use of indirect refusal strategies is 67.45%, while the use of
direct refusal is only 32.55%. The result indicates that children attempted to use indirect strategies to mitigate the threat to interlocutor’s face caused by refusals. In
order to understand children’s performance of refusals more thoroughly, the frequency of different refusal strategies was examined, as shown in table 3.
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Table 3. Frequency of refusal strategies
Strategy Number of tokens Percentage (%)
Simple negation 81 31.76
Conditional acceptance 2 0.78
Negated ability 2 0.78
Counterclaim 2 0.78
Physical force 2 0.78
Total 255 100
Table 3 presents the frequency of refusal strategies children employed when refusing their peers’ plans of action. The total number of tokens is 255 because there
were 32 refusals containing more than one strategy. The results indicate that children can apply a variety of strategies to refuse others. Ten types of strategies were found to be used by children. The two most dominant strategies were Simple negation and Reason, which combined accounted for more than half of all refusal strategies used by the children. Other strategies such as Verbal and Nonverbal avoidance, Alternatives, Dissuasion, Conditional acceptance, Negated ability, Counterclaim, and Physical force were also used. The qualitative analysis of these refusal strategies is provided in the following sections.
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4.1.1 Simple negation
Among the strategies, Simple negation (31.76%) was the most frequently used.
The commonly used linguistic forms are buxing and buyao. The following example illustrates how a child uses a direct refusal with his peer:
Example 1: JUN and CAI are playing with blocks.
1. JUN: 借我一個就好了.
‘Just lend me one [block].’
2. CAI: 不行.
‘No.’
In example 1, JUN asked CAI to lend him one block, and CAI refused him with a Simple negation: 不行 buxing ‘No’. Simple negation is the most explicit strategy, and thus can be very effective in conveying noncompliance. However, Simple negation is considered impolite since the speaker does nothing to minimize the threat
to the face of the hearer. Using this kind of direct refusal suggests that the child is focusing on his or her own unwillingness and does not take the hearer’s face into
account.
4.1.2 Reason
Aside from Simple negation, the children also refused by giving reasons fairly often (26.67%). Some studies in adults’ interactions suggested that the only way in which a request may be refused with reasonable politeness is to give an account (Goffman, 1976). From the reasons provided by children, we found that some are
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self-oriented while some are nonself-oriented. Self-oriented reasons refer to reasons which mainly demonstrate the speaker’s own needs, feelings, or desires. Example 2
demonstrates how the child used a self-oriented reason to refuse the listener’s request.
In example 2, LIN asked NIN to build a house with her. However, NIN refused her with a self-oriented reason that he wanted to build something else — a triangle. In terms of perspective-taking ability, the child seemed to concentrate on his own desire and therefore revealed that although he understood the hearer’s need for a reason for the refusal, he still cared more about his own desire and thought from his own
‘I want to build a triangle.’
By contrast, nonself-oriented reasons refer to social rules, regulations, or others’
feelings. Consider example 3.
Example 3
1. JUN: 我也要玩.
‘I want to play, too.’
2. LIN: 這邊只能兩個人玩.
‘Only two people can play here.’
Instead of stating her own needs or feelings, LIN rationalized her refusal by citing a regulation that only two people were allowed to play in that classroom.
Because a regulation is beyond one’s control, providing such a reason implies that the
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causing the hearer to lose face.The results showed that children assumed others have reasons for saying what they say. Therefore, one cannot just say no. A simple no was not accepted by most children as sufficient. The refuser is expected to give an explanation for noncompliance. The reason for failing to comply would be queried if not provided by the refuser, as shown in example 4. DOR wanted to watch TV, however, SAL refused her request with a direct refusal without giving any reason. DOR did not accept her refusal and queried about her reasons for noncompliance. After SAL supplied her with a reason for refusing, DOR finally accepted it.
Example 4
‘Because this [toy remote control] is mine.’
4.1.3 Nonverbal avoidance
Children sometimes use nonverbal avoidance such as remaining silent when refusing. Nonverbal avoidance (13.33%) was commonly used as refusal by children.
However, few studies have paid attention to this strategy. The reason lies in the
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different methods of data collection. Previous studies used experiments or questionnaires such as Discourse Completion Test to elicit children’s refusal. Such important strategies never appear under those methods and are thus neglected.
Therefore, it is proved that naturally obtained data provide us with a better way to understand children’s authentic refusal performance.
In our data, children sometimes ignored the request and kept doing what they are doing or even walked away from the requester without giving any response. Example 5 illustrates how children used nonverbal avoidance to refuse a request.
Example 5
1. ZHI: 那個拿過來.
‘Bring that to me.’
2. JUN: 0 [% 繼續玩玩具].
0 [% keeps playing with the toy]
In example 5, ZHI asked JUN to bring her the block. ZHI’s request was clear and loud;
however, JUN ignored her request. He simply remained silent and kept playing with his toy, hoping that ZHI will give up her request.
Remaining silent is considered impolite because it shows no respect to the hearer.
It makes the hearer feel that his or her request is not only being refused but even
It makes the hearer feel that his or her request is not only being refused but even