Earlier studies have reported that adults are more likely to interrupt children, assuming that the powerful one interrupts the less powerful one (Gleason 1987).
However, the findings of this study showed that the mothers did not interrupt more than their children. In fact, the children may be even more likely to interrupt their mothers. This may result from the children’s less compliance with the turn-taking principles and their inability to observe the transitional relevance places. Moreover, it was found that a greater proportion of the mothers’ interruptions were related to rapport rather than power. Most of the mothers’ interruptions resulted from active listening and high involvement, and resulted in encouragement and facilitation of the children’s speech. The findings were in contrast to the view that interruptions manifest dominance and power (James and Clarke 1993) but were consistent with the view that interruptions can be supportive and cooperative (James and Clarke 1993). We may speculate that the mothers’ interruption behaviors may also reflect the mothers’
socio-economic status (SES). As pointed out by Romaine (2001), language use varies with social classes. It has been suggested that different SES parents interact with their children in different ways in book reading and free plays (Snow et al. 1976 and Hoff-Ginsberg 1991). For example, parents from the upper-middle class produce more open-ended questions and fewer yes/no questions than parents from low and lower-middle classes; in addition, parents from higher SES tend to use fewer directives (Snow et al. 1976). Thus, it is possible that the two mothers’ more rapport-oriented style of interruptions was associated with the fact that both of the mothers were from the upper-middle class. However, since this can only be a speculation in this study, further research is needed to systematically investigate the relationship between parental interruption behaviors and social classes.
As for the children’s interruptions, it was found that the children at age three also produced relatively more rapport-oriented interruptions. Like their mothers, the children would also use interruptions to collaboratively construct propositions with
their mothers or to request more information. However, the children also made power-oriented interruptions, in which the children may reveal their intent to discontinue the current topic or they may simply initiate a new topic.
In terms of relevance and information status, our findings showed that the children’s interruptions were more likely to include relevant and new information, which indicated that the children at this stage were capable of tracking the current topic and making contributions to the conversation. Such interruptions were likely to succeed in getting the attention of and responses from the mothers. The ability to relate one’s own utterance to the preceding utterance of the interlocutor contingently and in a topic-related way is an essential component of conversational skills and is an important task for language-learning children (Huang 2004). It has also been reported that the development of children’s conversational skills can be characterized by an increasing ability to supply new information in order to maintain discourse topics (Bedrosian 1985). In this present study, it appeared that the children’s ability to provide interruptions with relevant and new information demonstrated the children’s communicative ability of topic management, and the skills of assessing the listener’s perspectives and the new/given information status.
Despite all the findings, this study leaves room for improvement and further inquiry. First of all, the number of subjects and the tokens of interruptions were limited. Therefore, to better our understanding of interruption in Mandarin adult-child conversation, the access to a larger amount of data is needed. Moreover, as previous studies indicate, gender may have an effect on how often interruptions are made and how the interruptions are treated. Although the child subjects of this study included a boy and a girl, the number of interruptions in our data was not large enough to analyze the children’s interruptions appropriately in terms of gender differences. Thus, further studies on the relationship between gender and interruption behaviors are needed in order to obtain a more complete picture of interruption in Mandarin adult-child conversation.
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[Received 5 June 2006; revised 18 July 2006; accepted 22 July 2006]
Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Chengchi University Taipei, TAIWAN
Pei-chun Lu: echo0820@hotmail.com Chiung-chih Huang: cchuang@nccu.edu.tw
Appendix
CHAT symbols
(adopted from MacWhinney,1995)
. period
? question
! exclamation
0 action without speech ,, tag question
-: lengthening
+… trailing off +/. Interruption +, self-completion +^ quick uptake
# pause
%sit situation coding [?] best guess
[/] retracting without correction [//] retracting with correction [= ] explanation
[% ] comment on main line [>] [<] overlapping utterance xxx/xx unintelligible speech
漢語母子對話中打斷現象之研究
呂佩君、黃瓊之 國立政治大學
本研究的目的為瞭解母子對話中的打斷現象，分析的語料來自於 兩對以漢語為母語的母子對話，兩位小孩皆為三歲。首先，為瞭解母 親與孩子打斷句之本質，我們採用 Goldberg（1990）的分類來做判斷，
結果顯示兩者在對談中皆大多使用 rapport-oriented interruptions，代表 在母子對話中，兩方傾向在打斷句中表達對對方話語的興趣與投入，
並藉由著打斷來一同建立談話主題。再者，小孩的打斷句更進一步使 用 Dunn and Shatz（1989）的研究方法來分析其與對話言談的語意關 連，結果發現小孩的打斷句大多包含了與之前相關並且新的訊息，而 這類的打斷句是最有可能得到母親的注意與回應。
關鍵字：打斷現象、母子對話、語言習得