Although the provision of topic related utterances is an essential component of conversational skills, it will still be impossible to develop a conversation successfully if children fail to provide new information. Since an interruption cuts off the turn of another speaker and takes over the floor, important or urgent new information is expected to be revealed in the interruption. So if a child fails to provide new information in his/her interruption, there may be a higher chance that the interruption would fail to get attention. It has been suggested that the younger the child who interrupts, the more likely are the interruptions to be ignored because of the repetitious nature of the interruptions (Ervin-Tripp 1979:399).
In Example (21), the mother said she was going to draw bananas for the child, and then the child interrupted and asked for cherries to be drawn as well. In this case, the child’s interruption elaborated and expanded the content of the previous turn and added new information to the topic.
(21) *MOT: 媽媽幫你畫香蕉.
*MOT: 畫這個香蕉是 +/.
Æ *CHI: 還要畫櫻桃喔.
*MOT: 好.
MOT: I’ll draw you bananas.
MOT: The bananas will be +/.
CHI: Will you also draw cherries?
MOT: Ok.
It was found in our data that the children’s interruptions which contained new information took up 88.6% of interruptions, revealing that at age three, the children were already capable of making contributions to the conversation by providing new information.
In contrast, in Example (22) below, the child’s interruption contained “old”
information because it was simply a repetition of his previous utterance.
(22) *MOT: 好我們再來玩一次.
*CHI: +^ 你眼+//.
*CHI: 你眼睛閉起來.
*MOT: 喔 -: +//.
*MOT: 不要.
*MOT: 我(/2) 我給你 [/] 我給你玩.
*MOT: 來我媽媽藏 [/] 我媽+/.
Æ *CHI: 你眼睛閉起來.
*MOT: 糖果躲貓貓快點 [/] 快點+...
MOT: Let’s play one more time.
CHI: Your eyes +//.
CHI: Close your eyes.
MOT: Oh +//.
MOT: No.
MOT: I’ll I’ll play with you.
MOT: Mother will hide mother +/.
CHI: Close your eyes.
MOT: Candy, hide and seek, hurry [/] hurry …
In Example (22), the child made a request to the mother to close her eyes but the request was rejected. The child repeated the request again via interruption. Although the interruptive self-repetition highlighted the child’s intent, the interruption was
ignored by the mother.
3.2.3 Success
Two possible situations may occur after a child’s interruption. First, the interruption may successfully get the mother’s attention, being answered directly, and reference is made to it in the speaker turn. Or it may simply be ignored without receiving any response. By observing the children’s successful and unsuccessful interruptions, we can see in what ways the mothers accepted and responded to the children’s interruptions, and under what situations the mothers chose to ignore them.
Examples (23)-(24) below exhibit successful interruptions. It was found that the recognition of the child’s interruption by the mother was often realized by repeating the whole or part of the child’s interruption: over 40% of the successful interruptions in our data involved repetition in the responses. This is because via repetition, one can not only show his/her participatory listener-ship and acceptance of other’s utterance but also ratify other’s contributions (Tannen 1989). Sometimes the repetition might be accompanied by an utterance final particle, as in (23), or with a tag question, as in (24) to seek confirmation from the child.
(23) *MOT: 好了他們就要趕快回家囉 趕快跑回家囉 xx 半夜 +/.
*CHI: 我們就坐坐那個 坐坐坐坐那個 飛機載他們回家.
Æ *MOT: +^ 喔 要坐飛機載他們回家呀.
MOT: Ok, they will hurry home, run home in a hurry xx midnight +/.
CHI: We’ll take take that, take take take that plane to send them home.
MOT: Oh, take the plane to send them home.
(24) *MOT: 會害怕是嗎?
*MOT: # 那 <你> [>] +/.
*CHI: # <要> [<] 要大人陪.
Æ *MOT: 要大人陪,, 是不是?
MOT: Are you afraid?
MOT: Then you +/.
CHI: I need an adult to accompany me.
MOT: An adult to accompany you, right?
The second common device the mothers used to ratify the children’s interruptions was a single word acknowledgement hao ‘OK’, occupying more than 20% of the responses to the successful interruptions. Similar to the use of repetition, hao could also signal the mothers’ listener-ship as well as acceptance of the children’s
interruptions, as shown in Example (25) below and Example (21) above.
(25) *CHI: 咬 <她> [= SIS] 的嘴巴 要咬她 要咬她咬她.
*MOT: 好 那就 +/.
*CHI: 咬她.
Æ *MOT: 好 # 好.
CHI: Bite her mouth, bite her bite her.
MOT: Ok, then +/.
CHI: Bite her.
MOT: Alright, Ok.
Unsuccessful child interruptions are overall rare in our data, 6 out of 35, or 17.1%.
With only these limited cases, it was found that the reasons leading to the mothers’
disregard of these interruptions seemed elusive. However, by observing certain examples, we might be able to get a glimmer of it. Consider the following example in which the mother, the child and the baby sister were playing with jigsaw puzzles together.
(26) *CHI: 啊 xx 我不要拼 我不要拼了 不要跟妳們玩了.
*MOT: 啊 那 <我們> [= referring to MOT and SIS] +/.
*CHI: 我不要跟妹妹玩了!
Æ *MOT: +, 我們來拼 好 這個 xx xx 的耳朵在這裡.
*SIS: 這裡!
CHI: Ah xx! I don’t want to play. I don’t want to play. I don’t want to play with you anymore.
MOT: Ah, then let’s +/.
CHI: I don’t want to play with sister.
MOT: Let’s play. Ok, this xx xx ear is right here.
SIS: Here!
In the example, the child was aggravated by her younger sister’s participation in the game, so she repeatedly claimed that she did not want to play with the mother and the sister anymore. Her complaint even interrupted the mother’s utterance. However, it appeared that such willful uncooperative behavior was dispreferred, so the mother chose to ignore it and resumed her interrupted utterance and continued to play with the sister.
Example (22), which we have seen earlier, presents another child interruption which failed to get attention. The unsuccessful interruption Close your eyes was a
repeated request, and the initial one had been directly rejected by the mother.
Although the child adopted the strategy of self-repetition to emphasize his intent, the mother simply ignored it, paying no attention at all. That is to say, without giving new information in the interruption, the child failed to get a response.
From the above examples, we can see that unsuccessful interruptions might result from old information of the children’s interruptions or their undesirable behavior. On the other hand, the children’s interruptions which included relevant and new information were likely to lead to attention getting.