Chapter 4 Results
4.1.2 The Conversational Parameter Level
control LIN’s physical behaviors rather than verbal behaviors:
(2) LIN is looking at a penguin on the cover of a videotape.
1 *MOT: 一綾姊姊請問你在幹什麼?
‘What are you doing, LIN?’
2 *LIN: 我在看企鵝.
‘I’m looking at the penguin.’
3 *MOT: 你在看企鵝.
‘You’re looking at the penguin.’
4 *MOT: 那請你的腳可不可以把他放出來.
‘Please take out your feet.’
5 *LIN: 唉唷我知道了啦 [= in loud voice]!
‘O.K. I knew it!’
In example (2), LIN was thinking about which videotape to watch and looking at one of the videotapes. LIN’s mother asked what she was doing and was provided with LIN’s proper response. However, LIN’s mother didn’t elicit more information about what LIN was focusing on but turned to control the place she thought her child’s feet should be in.
4.1.2 The Conversational Parameter Level
Table 4 Results of two mothers’ conversational parameter level
LIN’s Mother LJW’s Mother
Topic Maintenance 9.4 (952/101) 19.2(1973/103)
Rate of Topic Change 9.9% (131/1316) 2.7%(78/2925)
Results of the mothers’ conversational parameter are illustrated in table 4. It can be clearly observed that the average length of topic episode maintained by LJW’s mother and LJW was 19.2, which is much longer than that maintained by LIN’s mother and LIN
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(9.4). As for the rate of topic change, results showed that LIN’s mother changed topics much more frequently than LJW’s mother. In general, the two mothers’ conversational behaviors in the conversational parameter differed to a great extent.
In section 4.1.1 and 4.1.2, the two mothers’ speech was analyzed in terms of the speech category level and the conversational parameter level. In the next section, results of the two levels are to be compared to those in McDonald and Pien (1982) and
Olsen-Fulero (1982)’s study. In addition, results of the conversational parameter level will be further examined in terms of the two dyads’ conversational interactions in section 4.3.
4.1.2 Maternal Interactional Style of the Two Mothers
By looking into the two mothers’ distribution of utterances in the speech category level and the conversational parameter level in the previous sections, pictures of the two mother’s conversational characteristics were presented. As hypothesized by McDonald and Pien (1982), determination of maternal underlying intention would be inferable from patterning of illocutionary acts of mothers. In terms of the speech category level, by adopting directives much more frequently than LJW’s mother, LIN’s mother seemed intending more to control LIN’s physical actions. In terms of the conversational
parameter level, LIN’s mother changed topics much more frequently than LJW’s mother and LIN’s dyad maintained topics through less turns than LJW’s dyad. Compared with McDonald & Pien (1982), LIN’s mother’s cluster of conversational behaviors conformed more to the directive mother distinguished in their study, and LJW’s mother’s cluster of conversational behaviors conformed more to the conversation-elicitatiing mother.
Compared with Olsen-Fulero (1982)’s study, LIN’s mother conformed more to the
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directive mother, and LJW’s mother conformed more to the conversational mother. In the study, the interactional style of LIN’s mother would be considered more directive and LJW’s mother would be considered more conversational-eliciting in the study. With such intentions of the two mothers in mind, we are to relate them to the two dyads’
topic-maintaining in section 4.3.
4.2 Children’s Speech in Topic Maintaining Utterances
In this section, the two children’s topic maintaining competences are examined by means of communicative intents, topic collaboration / incorporation, and rate of topic change.
4.2.1 Communicative Intents
Table 5 Results of two children’s communicative intents in topic-maintaining utterances
LIN LJW
Declaratives 84(18.2%) 198(19.8%)
Questions 29(6.3%) 37(3.7%)
Requests 77(16.7%) 70(7%)
Acknowledgements 27(5.9%) 77(7.7%)
Responses 243(52.8%) 617(61.8%)
Total 460(100%) 999(100%)
Results of two children’s communicative intents in topic-maintaining utterances are presented in table 5. In both LIN’s and LJW’s topic-maintaining utterances, responses are the most frequently occurring communicative intent, taking up nearly half tokens in both data, which corresponds to their mother’s frequent uses of questions in their utterances.
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Nevertheless, LJW appealed to responses more often than LIN did when maintaining topics, which might suggest that LJW attended more to her mother’s questions or requests than LIN.
(3) MOT and LJW are talking about LJW’s going to the dentist in the morning.
1 *MOT: 去哪裡看牙齒?
‘Where did you go check your teeth?’
2 *LJW: 去 -: 醫院.
‘Went to the hospital.’
3 *MOT: 去醫院.
‘Went to the hospital.’
4 *MOT: 去萬芳醫院對不對?
‘Went to Wan Fang Hospital, right? ’ 5 *LJW: 嗯.
In example (3), LJW’s mother asked LJW about the incident of seeing dentist earlier in the morning. Instead of leaving LJW to describe the whole incident by herself, LJW’s
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mother eased the task by constantly asking questions which elicit just one piece of information at a time. It can be observed in the example that LJW continued catching up with her mother’s questions and providing relevant replies to her mother’s inquiries about the incident of seeing the dentist. The whole topic episode concerning seeing the dentist in fact continued for more than 40 speaking turns, to which the mother contributed mostly questions and LJW mostly responses.
While LJW adopted more responses (61.8%) than LIN (52.8%) when maintaining topics, LIN adopted slightly more questions (6.3%) and much more requests (16.7%) than LJW (3.7 % and 7%). Compared to results in previous study (Wanska & Bedrosian, 1986; Huang, 2004), LIN’s frequent performance of maintaining discourse topics by requesting is salient and thus deserves investigation.
(4) MOT is asking for the toy bear.
In example (4) , LIN’s mother was requesting for the toy bear that was brought in by the observer ‘Uncle’. LIN’s mother began with claiming the possession of the toy bear. After the possession was denied by LIN, the mother continued to reissue the possession by
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providing evidence regarding the source from which the toy bear came. LIN then appealed to a request that displayed her refusal. In terms of communicative intents, frequent occurrence of requests in LIN’s topic maintenance might be explained in two aspects. From the child’s angle, the intention of requesting in topic maintenance implied that LIN was egocentric in some way that when she was interacting with her mother, she put more attention on her personal needs than the conversation itself. In other words, instead of eagerly participating in the conversational interaction, LIN tented to relate the present conversation to her own desires or intentions. From the angle of interacting with the mother, LIN’s mother’s intention to control her child’s physical behaviors might lead to the dyad’s less interest of participating in the conversation. That is, if the mother frequently directs the child to do things, it might turn out that continuing of a
conversation or maintaining of a discourse are overlooked or even ignored by the dyad.
In sum, in either points of view it suggested that compared with LJW, LIN’s intention of requesting revealed her greater interest in her own desires rather than being engaged in the conversational interaction. As for interaction of the two dyads, more discussions will be conducted after the conversational parameters are examined in section 4.3.
Besides a great number of responses among LIN and LJW’s topic-maintaining utterances, their second frequent uses, declaratives, are fairly equal (18.2% and 19.8%).
As reported in Huang’s (2004) study, prevalence of declaratives, termed as informatives in Huang‘s study, might be explained by the less interactive nature of informatives in the present point of age. This suggested that in the current case, being inadequately
interactive, the two three-year-olds children were not mature enough regarding the conversational skills and still required their mothers’ elicitation in the interaction.
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4.2.2 Topic Incorporation/Collaboration
Table 6 Results of two children’s topic incorporation/collaboration in topic-maintaining utterance
LIN LJW
Topic Incorporation 251(54.6%) 506(50.6%)
Topic Collaboration 209(45.4%) 493(49.4%)
Total 460(100%) 999(100%)
Concerning the information provided by the two children, results of two children’s topic incorporation/collaboration in topic-maintaining utterance are presented in table 6.
In half of the time, both LIN (54.6%) and LJW (50.6%) incorporated new information when maintaining topics at about age 3, suggesting that by means of the mother’s
elicitation they were already capable of taking propositions in the previous utterances as foundations and adding new materials to them. At this point, quantitative analysis of two the children’s topic incorporation/collaboration in topic-maintaining utterance suggested that LIN and LJW displayed nearly equal sophistication in providing new materials when maintaining discourse topics. Since understanding of children’s topic-maintaining
capacity cannot be done without exploring how new materials are added in continuing of discourse topics, qualitative analysis of LIN and LJW’s topic maintenance was conducted with respect to topic incorporation/collaboration.
At most of the times, maintaining of discourse topics was eased by their mother’s successive elicitations, such as questions in similar structure and content that were sometimes partially repetitive:
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(5) MOT and LIN are talking about voting for popular cartoon characters.
1 *MOT: 你早上不是說要投給 -: 皮什麼 +…
‘Didn’t you say in the morning that you would vote for someone named /pi/…?’
2 *LIN: ++ <皮卡丘> [= cartoon character].
‘Pokemon.’
3 *MOT: 啊妹妹投給誰?
‘Who did Sister vote for?’
4 *LIN: <kitty> [= cartoon character] .
‘Who did Mother vote for?’
10 *LIN: 也投給哈姆太郎.
‘Hamtaro, too.’
11 *MOT: 我也投給哈姆太郎.
‘I voted for Hamtaro, too.’
In example (5), LIN and her mother were talking about which cartoon character to vote for. By continuing asking which character did a specific person vote for, structure and content of the questions were partially repeated in line 3, 6 and 9 as ‘who did X vote for’.
Within the clear context where the discussion of which character to vote for was attended
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by the dyad, the verb ‘vote for’ could even be omitted by the mother in line 6 without causing any problem in LIN’s understanding. Given elicitations in repetition, the child could thus produce relatively more substantial contributions and maintain topics for more turns (Huang, 2004).
Generally, due to the unsophisticated conversational skills, maintaining of discourse topics for children relies heavily on mothers’ elicitations. As a result, the parents tend to become the dominant speakers in the parent-child conversation interaction. Intending to engage their children in the conversation, the parents would be likely to elicit their children with successive questions like what was illustrated above (Huang, 2004). Or, if their intentions are not to elicit their children’s verbal participation but to control their children’s physical behaviors, they may adopted a lot of directives or devote themselves to long monologue (McDonald & Pien, 1982). In one way or the other, the parents are usually the dominant speakers who control the development of topics. Nevertheless, in our data, situations where the child took good control of the developed topics were observed:
(6) LIN claims that she want to raise pigs at home.
1 *MOT: 一綾啊 # 那個你如果看到有那個小豬在跑 # 那是電視裡面的.
‘LIN, if you saw pigs running, that happened only in TV.’
2 *MOT: 那個不能養你知道嗎?
‘Do you know that you can not actually raise them?’
3 *MOT: 我們家哪有地方可以養.
‘There is no space for it in our place.’
4 *MOT: 養你們兩隻就受不了了.
‘Raising you two is enduring enough.’
5 *LIN: 養在下面好了.
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‘Just raise it down there.’
6 *MOT: 哪個下面啊?
‘Down where?’
7 *LIN: 不知道 # 養在門口好了.
‘I don’t know, then raise it at the entrance.’
8 *MOT: 養在門口啊?
‘Raise it at the entrance?’
9 *LIN: 嗯.
‘Yes.’
10 *MOT: 養在門口你不怕他跑走嗎?
‘Won’t you be afraid that it runs away?’
11 *MOT: 就不見啦.
In the above example, LIN expressed her great interest in raising a small pig at home. In the beginning, the mother discouraged LIN by appealing to several reasons and even mentioned that she already got LIN and her sister to raise. In spite of being strongly discouraged by her mother, LIN still continued to argue for raising the pig by providing several solutions that she thought would be workable. During the discussion, LIN kept contributing to the topic of raising the pig and gradually took control of the topic of raising the pig. A similar case was observed in another conversation of a pretend play where LIN and the mother were playing soldiers:
(7) LIN and the mother are playing soldiers.
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‘I still want to play the soldier.’
3 *MOT: 士兵 # 好.
‘Soldier, fine.’
4 *MOT: 請問士兵是…
‘And what does the soldier…’
5 *LIN: 士兵要拿著 <這個> [= toy sword] 啊 # 士兵.
‘The soldier has to take this.’
6 *LIN: 然後 # 然後你要拿 <這個> [= another toy sword].
‘And you take this one.’
7 *LIN: 你要拿這個啊.
‘You have to take this one.’
8 *LIN: 你剛是拿 <這個> [= toy sword No.8] 對不對?
‘You took this one, right?’
9 *MOT: 我不是拿這個 # 對不起 # 是拿六.
‘I did not take this one, excuse me, I took No.6.’
10 *LIN: 六 # 你拿 # 你拿出來.
‘No.6, you take it out.’
In the above pretend play, the mother did not control the conversation but asked for directions from LIN. LIN produced successive utterances, consisting of 3 directives in one turn from line 5 to 8, making more contribution than her mother and dominating the conversation. In sum, in the conversational interaction, elicitations of the mothers play significant roles in the young children’s maintaining of discourse topics. By means of such kind of maternal scaffolding, maintaining topics thus becomes less demanding for children. However, as children’s communicative competence develops, they take
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increasing control of the conversation and require less help from their mother in the conversational interaction (Foster, 1982; Huang, 2004).
Besides the mother’s dominant role in the child’s topic maintenance, the types of discourse topic to which the dyad attended were investigated as well. Children at this age usually maintain here-and-now topics, which regards objects that are easy for children to assess at hands or going-on events they are dealing with. In parent-child conversational interaction, maintenance of now-and-here topics often occurs in routines such as meal time, toy-playing, and book-reading. Take example (8) for example, in book-reading LJW was presented with a book from which her mother could easily request for information:
(8) MOT is pointing to a zebra in the book.
‘Where are the ears?’
8 *LJW: 耳朵在這兩邊.
‘Ears are in the two sides.’
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By referring to the book, not only could the mother rapidly decide types of information to request for and questions to ask but also could LJW sometimes provide answers or new materials by simply pointing to something in the book. For example, the topic was maintained by LJW’S referring to the ears of the zebra in line 4. Instead of naming the zebra’s body part ‘ears’, LJW merely pointed to it with the referential expression ‘this’.
Similarly, in line 7, LJW replied to her mother’s question simply by directly pointing to the position of the ears rather than by providing answer such as ‘on the head’. Further survey of the data also revealed that LJW at times brought in information in such way, suggesting that she is more or less a referential child. In some cases, LJW brought in materials by using referential expressions even when these materials were not presented in front of her or being at joint attention. As illustrated in the above example, in
maintaining topics, LJW’s referential nature in referring to things thus often led to her mother’s subsequent questions meant for clarifying the exact referents or ensuring LJW’s knowledge of naming the things.
Besides here-and-now topics, by means of the mother’s elicitation, children at this age already have the ability of talking about displacement topics considering past events3
3Talking of a past event could be also seen in example (3), p.35.
or non-present objects:
(8) MOT and LJW are talking about the story of a lion and a mouse.
1 *MOT: 獅子跟老鼠為什麼變成好朋友?
‘Why did the lion and the mouse become good friends?’
2 *LJW: <因為> [/] 因為他們相處在一起.
‘Because they get along with each other.’
3 *MOT: 為什麼他們相處在一起?
‘Why did they get along with each other?’
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‘I already told you.’
This example was remarkable since it indicated that LJW remembered the event of having been asked the same question and answered it, which was in fact more than 20 turns away from her present utterances in line 4. This suggested that being engaged in the conversation, LJW was capable of taking the whole structured framework, e.g., the stretch of talking about the reasons for the friendship between the lion and the mouse, as the proposition with which she develop a new proposition.
4.2.3 Rate of Topic Chang
Table 7 Results of two children’s rate of topic change
LIN LJW
Topic Maintaining Utterances
460 999
Topic Shifting Utterances 66 104
Total 526 1103
Child’s Rate of Topic Change
12.5% 9.1%
Table 7 shows that LIN changed topics slightly more frequently than LJW did but there is no significant difference. Together with their equivalent capacity in incorporating / collaborating topics shown in section 4.2.2, it suggested that LIN and LJW displayed nearly the same in terms of the capacity of topic maintaining but showed subtle difference in terms of communicative intent in topic-maintaining, as shown in section
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4.2.1.
In section 4.2, how discourse topics were maintained by the mothers’ constant elicitations and the children’s responses, and the types of topics discussed within the interactions were investigated. In terms of the two children’s performance of topic collaboration / incorporation in maintaining discourse topics, it seemed that they could not only matching the propositions in the previous utterances produced by their mothers, but also provide new information in varieties of situation. They were also capable of maintaining here-and-now and non-present topics with their mothers’ elicitations. In some circumstances, e.g., free talks and pretend plays presented above, they could even take control over the development of discourse topics. In addition, the two children change topic with nearly equal frequency. However, from this aspect their capacities seemed illustrating no difference despite of their mothers’ different conversational behaviors.
4.3 Interaction of Maternal Interactional Styles and Topic Maintenance
As mentioned above, the parents play significant roles in helping the childrenparticipate in conversations and maintain conversational topics. In other words, adults are usually the dominant speakers in adult-child conversations. They usually keep
conversations going by asking lots of questions, which serve to give the floor to the young participants who might have difficulties conforming to the same conversational topic and not yet fully acquire the competences of turn taking and topic maintaining.
Besides the immature conversational skills, distraction and impatience of children could occur in occasion and make it even harder for them to maintain conversational topics. In
Besides the immature conversational skills, distraction and impatience of children could occur in occasion and make it even harder for them to maintain conversational topics. In