Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 Discourse Topic and Topic Management
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conversations.
Acknowledging the contributions and conducting further study of McDonald and Pien’s (1982) study, Olsen-Fulero’s (1982) distinguished two major styles of maternal speech by adopting illocutionary force and conversational parameters as categorization systems: mother who influences and mother who instructs. To provide detailed
description of the conversational style displayed by each mother, the mother who influences are divided into three sub-categories that together form a
continuum—directive, intrusive, and conversational speech styles, which influence the child’s linguistic and cognitive development of the child. The instructive style is also classified as didactic by Olsen-Fulero, which is considered an information-oriented style opposed to child-oriented style, or directive style. In Olsen-Fulero’s classification, the mother who influences is conformed to the directive mother and the mother who instructs is conformed to the responsive mother in Nelson’s (1973) study.
In sum, what the above studies contribute to the inquiry of maternal styles related to children’s language development is that they provide plausible ways in which mothers’
individual differences and underlying communicative intents can be examined by clusters of intercorrelated variables. In addition, statistically significant differences among distinct maternal styles and stability of maternal styles across two time sessions (Olsen-Fulero, 1982) also suggest that maternal styles can be distinguished.
2.3 Discourse Topic and Topic Management
In research concerning the term topic, there have been plenty of definitions and ideas within distinct theoretical approaches. Considering topic a syntactic notion, Mandarin has been considered a topic-prominent language where sentences are usually
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expressed in topic-comment structure (Li & Thompson, 1981). Rather than preposed or base-generated syntactic topic and semantic topic, or frame proposed by Her (1991),
topic is used as a discourse notion in this study in line with Keenan and Schieffelin’s
(1976, 1983) model.Keenan and Schieffelin (1983) stated that discourse topic is the proposition (or set of propositions) about which the speaker is either providing or requesting new
information—not an NP but a proposition. In mother-child conversation, continuation of a discourse topic is frequently achieved by means of adjacency pair of question-answer.
In terms of the continuity of discourse topics, a distinction was made by Keenan and Schieffelin (1983): continuous discourse and discontinuous discourse. Continuous
discourse is further divided into collaborating discourse topic and incorporating discourse topic, where the former refers to a topic that matches exactly that of the immediately preceding utterance and the later refers to a topic that takes some presupposition of the immediately preceding topic and integrates a claim or new information. As for
discontinuous discourse, it includes introducing topic and reintroducing topic. In both cases there are changes of discourse without drawing on the previous utterance.
According to Keenan and Schieffelin (1983), there are four prerequisites for establishing a discourse topic for both the speaker and the hearer: being attentive, articulating and receiving of the utterances, identification of the referents mentioned in the utterances, and identification of the semantic relations obtaining between the referents.
Those prerequisites thus explicate the difficulty for young children to participate in and attend to a discourse topic. First, children may have not attended in the first place. Even if they do, they only have limited attention span and thus usually fail to collaborate on or
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incorporate discourse for an extended period of time. Second, they are easily distracted by other new things they have noticed in the physical environment, which is frequently presented by children’s sudden topic initiations in conversation. Finally, they may not provide a relevant next utterance because they do not understand the point due to their inadequacy in linguistic competence or failure in identification of the relationships between the introduced referents.
Foster (1982) paid attention on the ability to initiate and maintain conversational topics of children’s development of the communicative competence. In the study
discourse topic was assumed to be the proposition or set of propositions about which the speaker is either providing or requesting information, which was in line with Keenan and Schieffelin’s (1976). In addition, Foster pointed out that a fully developed discourse topic involves not merely a single proposition but a sequence of propositions related both to each other and to a macroproposition that represents the sequence as a whole. The purpose of Foster’s study was to discover how children acquire the skills of topic management in the prelinguistic and early linguistic period.
Subjects were five middle-class first-born children. Data were collected at six points with their ages growing, from 0;1 to 2;6. An hour of videotape of mother-child interaction at home was collected from each child at specified ages. Results indicated that mothers tended to produce more contributions to topics and in general there tended to be few contributions on the same topic except for mother-child mutual engagement in a structured routine, e.g., games and other predictable sequences such as meals and book-reading. These routines provide child with task structure that sometimes children can contribute ‘performance without competence’ (Clark, 1974). Or children are provided
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ready-made structure by mother-controlled activities in which mothers scaffold children’s contributions by incorporating them into conversations as they are relevant to the ongoing activity. In such routines, children need only response to requests and questions and their mothers will put all the responses together into the larger framework of a topic. Foster (1982) also suggested that as children’s communicative competence develops, children display increasing control of these structures and even manipulate the structure by coming up with unexpected information.
Wanska and Bedrosian (1986) investigated topic discourse skills in thirty children ranging in age from 2;0 to 6;3 in mother-child interaction in free play sessions. Since children develop the ability to perform more sophisticated discourse skills in
conversation with increasing age, they proposed that the role of the participants,
particularly the mother, in relationship to the child within an interactional framework be examined constantly. This study was concerned with the discourse skill of topic
performance and its relationship to communicative intent. In this study the types of topics discussed by the participants, performance of topic management, and communicative intents in mother-child dyads were examined regarding topic initiation, shading, and topic maintenance. While topic initiation refers to the topic which is not linked in any way with the immediately preceding topic (Keenan & Schieffelin,1976), topic shading refers to the topic which involves a change of focus rather than a discrete transition from one topic to another. Results showed that topic maintenance was much greater for fantasy and
here-and-now topics than for displacement topic. In addition, mother initiated/shaded and maintained topics primarily by requests for all the three topic categories. Children used more informatives to initiate/shaded these topics, and maintained fantasy and
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displacement topics primarily by responses to mothers’ questions. These results suggested difficulty for children to discuss non-present objects or events and mothers’ significant role in facilitating their children’s discourse skills.
In research of the way in which discourse topics are presented in Mandarin
conversations and narratives, Chiu (2001) proposes that discourse topic is a topic chain which consists of semantically related clauses, which can be further categorized into sub-topic chains and sub-sub-topic chains. This hierarchical organization of discourse topic is in line with Foster’s (1982) assumption that a fully developed topic involves not just a single proposition, but a sequence of proposition related both to each other and to a macroproposition that represents the sequence as a whole. Huang (2002, 2004)
investigated the child’s capacity of topic management, including topic initiation and topic maintenance in Mandarin Chinese. In this study subjects were two two-year-old, two three-year-old, and two four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and their parents, one father and five mothers. The categorical system, in which mothers and children’s
communicative intents were examined, was similar to Wanska and Bedrosian’s (1986) study. Huang’s study indicated that children’s capacities increase through age and their advanced abilities may affect mothers’ language uses. While younger children showed tendencies toward topic collaboration, where topics are maintained without addition of new information, when maintaining discourse topics, increasingly sophisticated capacity of topic incorporation, where topics are maintained through adding new information, was observed among older children. Results also showed that in the use of communicative intents, children initiated and maintained topics primarily with informatives, which was conformed to Wanska and Bedrosian’s (1986) finding. Huang further indicated that the
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prevalence of informatives in children’s topic- initiating and topic-maintaining utterances might be explained by informatives’ less interactive nature and children’s egocentric nature in parent-child interaction.
Huang’s study also illustrated that in order to keep the discourse topics going on in parent-child conversation, parents’ elicitations and scaffolding play important roles.
While young children’s conversational skills are less developed and immature, topic maintenance relies largely on parents’ elicitations, which engage children in
conversations and make the topic maintenance less demanding for children. However, being sensitive to children’s language abilities, parents would make adjustments in adopting more topic incorporation as they find that their children have became more competent in communicative skills. As children’s capacities increase, parents would become less dominant in parent-child conversational interactions. This finding is
consistent with Foster’s (1986) study, in which children’s learning of topic management was examined. Yoder and Kaiser (1989) have also pointed out the possibility of
bidirectional or mutual influence, especially in social interaction.
‧ 3.1 Subject and Data collection
Subjects were two 3-year-old girls, LIN and LJW, who were both the first-borns and acquired Mandarin as their first language in middle class families, and their mothers.
LIN’s mother’s educational level was college and LJW’s mother was master.
Naturally occurring conversations of mother-child interactions were videotaped at home. Mothers were told to do what she would do as usual in interaction with their children. Both children had participated in Professor Chiung-chih Huang’s project of child language acquisition1
For each dyad, two sessions
where their nature interaction with the mothers had been recorded and traced for several times, eliminating factors such as unfamiliarity with the observer and anxiety in front of the camera that might affect the naturalness of the data.
The collected data were transcribed manually in accordance with the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) format.
2
1 I am grateful for Professor Huang’s kind support for the present study.
2 In the two sessions of each child, LIN’s age were 3;1.1 and 3;1.16, LJW’s were 3;0.25 and 3;1.8.
of one-hour data in which the child was around age 3 were examined, making up four hours in total. Activities engaged by the two dyads are presented in table 2. In both LIN and LJW’s dyads, free talks were commonly observed.
These free talks included discussion of the child’s likes and dislikes, recalling things that happened at school or in the past, and information-oriented discussions. In addition, story-telling took up great portions in both dyads’ interaction. When LIN’s dyad was dealing with story-telling, several episodes were concerned with role-playing. Besides free talks and story-telling, eating was also observed in both dyads’ interaction. As for
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differences among their activities, while LIN’s dyad was engaged in toy-playing at times, LJW’s dyad focused on book-reading instead. Other activities, including dancing,
drawing, and singing, took up merely minor portions of the data.
Table 2 Activity types in the two dyads’ conversational interaction
Mother-child Dyad LIN LJW
Activity Types
This section contains two parts and explicates how data were categorized in our study. Section 3.2.1 is concerned with the coding scheme of maternal speech styles which consists of speech category and conversational parameter. In section 3.2.2, category systems regarding the child’s topic-maintaining capacities are presented.
3.2.1 Maternal Interactional Style
In the mother-child interactions, mothers’ utterances are categorized based on previous studies (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006). The categorization system contained the speech category level and the conversational parameter level. In addition, the category system was revised for purpose of our study:
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Speech Category
a. Directives. A directive is an utterance which elicits and constraints the physical behavior of the hearer (Searle, 1975), e.g., “坐好!”
b. Questions. Questions are utterances which elicit verbal responses from the hearer and pass the floor to the hearer at the same time (Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006).
Since question serve as a device for mother to engage the child in conversation and pass the turn to the child, it usually takes up a great portion within mother’s utterances (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006). In order to analyze the performance of mother’s interactional styles to a greater extent, in this study we are to take a close look into mother’s utterances in question forms.
(1) Repairs. Repairs are used to keep the conversation going on, which usually appear in the forms of total or partial repetition of the hearer’s previous utterance (Lin, 2006), e.g., CHI: “媽媽我想要喝可樂.”, MOT: “你要喝什 麼?”
(2) Test questions. For a test question, a specific or restricted answer is required for the hearer (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006),e.g., “這是什麼顏色?”,”
綠的還是紅的?”
(3) Real questions. Real question refers to question that seeks information unknown to the speaker from the hearer (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006),e.g., “你中午吃什麼?”
(4) Verbal reflective questions. Verbal reflective questions are questions that pass the turn to the hearer without adding new information (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., “他很乖, 對不對?”
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(5) Action reflective questions. Action reflective questions are questions that pass the turn to the hearer when paying attention the hearer’s action, which often take the form of tag questions with falling intonation (McDonald &
Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., “你撞到了, 是不是?”
(6) Report questions. Report questions are questions serving to inform or comment on the child when he or she is not aware of a certain fact or event or becomes aware of that, which often take the form of tag questions with falling intonation (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., “是不是像爸爸 那麼胖?”
(7) Permission requests / offers of help. Permission requests are question used by the speaker to seek permission or acceptance for a certain action of the speaker (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., “媽媽幫你把這個打開 好不好?”
c. Declaratives: an utterance which provides new information or comments on children’s previous utterance or activity (Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006).
d. Prompts: an utterance with an attempt to force a response from the hearer to the speaker’s previous utterance (Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., “我們來看 書.”, ”好不好?”
e. Attention devices: Attention devices are utterances which are intended to attract the attention of the hearer (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., “好我們來 看喔.”
f. Responses: Responses are utterances which serve as feedbacks for questions or
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directives (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., CHI: “媽媽這是什麼?”, MOT: “這是長頸鹿啊.”
g. Acknowledgements: Acknowledgements are utterances which acknowledge either the child’s previous declarative statement or activity without adding new
information or commenting (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Lin, 2006), e.g., CHI: “我 喜歡吃番茄.”, MOT: “好.”
Conversational Parameters
a. Topic Maintenance: The average number of speaking turns devoted to the same discourse topic by the dyad as a unit.
b. Mother’s Rate of Topic Change: The proportion of utterances which shift the discourse topic out of the child’s total number of utterances.
3.2.2 Children’s Topic-maintaining Competence
The child’s topic maintaining utterances were analyzed according to the following categories.
Communicative Intents (Wanska & Bedrosian, 1986; Huang, 2004)
a. Informative: an utterance which gives information or comment in a declarative form.
b. Question: an utterance which asks for information in a question form.
c. Request: an utterance which asks for an action to be performed in a question, declarative or imperative form.
d. Acknowledgement: an utterance which recognizes the fact that the previous speaker has said or done something.
e. Response: an utterance involving a yes/no response to a question, or an answer
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supplied to a question asked.
Topic Incorporation/Collaboration (Keenan & Schieffelin, 1976; Huang, 2004)
In order to examine how frequently new information was provided by the children when maintaining discourse topics in interactional contexts, children’s topic-maintaining utterances were further divided into topic incorporation and topic collaboration
according to the information status provided. Topic incorporation refers to an utterance that continues the topic by matching the proposition of the previous utterance; topic collaboration refers to an utterance that continues the topic by adding or requesting additional information.
Child’s Rate of Topic Change
The proportion of utterances which shift the discourse topic out of the child’s total number of utterances.
3.3 Data Analysis
Section 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 regards how the collected data were analyzed according to the category system in previous studies. In section 3.3.3, how topic episode is identified for analyzing topic maintenance in mother-child interaction is presented.
3.3.1 Maternal Interactional Style
In order to differentiate maternal interactional styles in Mandarin mother-child conversational interactions, the category system was designed similarly to previous studies concerning maternal interactional styles (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006). For the speech category level, all the utterances produced by each mother were coded. For the conversational parameter level, the dyads’ topic maintenance and the mother’s rate of topic change were examined. Results of the two levels would
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together be investigated to see if their tendencies of conversational behaviors were consistent with those maternal interactional styles distinguished in previous studies.
3.3.2 Children’s Topic-maintaining Competence
In order to investigate how children related their utterances to preceding utterances produced by their mothers in the process of ongoing conversational exchange, all the topic-maintaining utterances of each child were first identified and then analyzed in accordance with communicative intents (Wanska & Bedrosian, 1986; Huang, 2004).
These topic-maintaining utterances were further analyzed in terms of topic collaboration and topic incorporation (Huang, 2004). In such a way, frequency of adding new
information in children’s topic-maintaining utterances could be observed. In addition, children’s rate of topic change was examined to see how frequent they change topics in the conversational interaction (McDonald & Pien, 1982; Olsen-Fulero, 1982; Lin, 2006).
3.3.3 Mother-child Interaction—Topic Episode
In order to investigate topic maintenance in mother-child interaction, data were examined based on topic episode, or conversational exchanges conforming to a
propositional content. For the purpose of our study, a topic episode is defined as a stretch of discourse that contains utterances that continue a discourse topic. A stretch of
discourse may contain a series of linked utterances and the utterances may be linked in a least two ways (Keenan & Schieffelin, 1983): First, two or more utterances may share the same discourse topic, which is considered collaborating discourse topics by Keenan and Schieffelin (1983). Second, discourse topics may take some presupposition of the
immediately preceding discourse topic and/or the new information provided relevant to the discourse preceding and use it in a new utterance, which is considered incorporating
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discourse topics by Keenan and Schieffelin (1983). In addition, both collaborating and
incorporating discourse topics are continuous topics.The following scheme presents how a topic episode is identified in our study:
Figure 1: Preliminary topic episode identification scheme
U1 topic introducing / reintroducing discourse topic A U2 collaborating / incorporating discourse topic A ((
))
Un-1 collaborating / incorporating discourse topic A Un topic introducing / reintroducing discourse topic B
A minimum topic episode is consisted of at least two utterances, a topic introducing / reintroducing utterance and a topic continuing utterance. If the immediately following utterance continues the discourse topic, the topic episode will become longer. Un represents that in theory the same discourse topic can be continued or maintained endlessly, which is nevertheless hardly possible in daily conversation due to physical
A minimum topic episode is consisted of at least two utterances, a topic introducing / reintroducing utterance and a topic continuing utterance. If the immediately following utterance continues the discourse topic, the topic episode will become longer. Un represents that in theory the same discourse topic can be continued or maintained endlessly, which is nevertheless hardly possible in daily conversation due to physical