Elinor Ochs

Culture and language development : language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village

List of photographs Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath Acknowledgements 1. To know a language 2. Methodology 3. Introduction to Samoan language usage: grammar and register 4. The social contexts of childhood: village and household organisation 5. Ergative case marking: variation and acquisition 6. Word-order strategies: the two-constituent bias 7. Clarification 8. Affect, social control and the Samoan child 9. The linguistic expression of affect 10. Literacy instruction in a Samoan village 11. Language as a symbol and tool Appendix I. Transcription conventions Appendix II. Canonical transitive verb types in childrens speech References Index.

Language has a heart

In the past several years, the social sciences have been articulating how emotion impacts cognition and social action. Linguists have underestimated the extent to which grammatical and discourse structures serve affective ends. A cross-linguistic analysis indicates that languages dedicate phonological, morpho-syntactic and discourse features to intensify and specify attitudes, moods, feelings and dispositions. These features provide an affective frame for propositions encoded. Suchframes can be consideredas pari of the Information expressed, äs affective comments on the expressed propositions they address. These comments Interface with gestural cues to provide interlocutors with critical Information on which to base subsequent social actions.

Talking to Children in Western Samoa.

This study examines the relation between cultural beliefs and values on the one hand and the organization of communication between caregivers and young children on the other. The study compares caregiver-child verbal interaction in two different communities, rural Western Samoa and Anglo middle class, with an emphasis on the former. It illustrates ways in which organization of turn-taking and procedures for clarification and interpretation are linked to beliefs and expectations concerning the nature of children and the social organization of caregiving. (Language acquisition, socialization, input, communicative competence, Oceania.)

Storytelling as a theory‐building activity

The present study examines the activity of storytelling at dinnertime in English‐speaking, Caucasian‐American families. Our findings demonstrate that, through the process of story co‐narration, family members draw upon and stimulate critical social, cognitive, and linguistic skills that underlie scientific and other scholarly discourse as they jointly construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct theories of everyday events. Each story is potentially a theory of a set of events in that it contains an explanation, which may then be overtly challenged and reworked by co‐narrators. Our data suggest that complex theory‐building through storytelling is promoted by (and constitutive of) interlocutors’ familiarity with one another and/or the narrative events. As such, long before children enter a classroom, everyday storytelling among familiars constitutes a commonplace medium for socializing perspective‐taking, critical thinking, and other intellectual skills that have been viewed as outcomes of formal schooling.

Inclusion as Social Practice: Views of Children with Autism

This study illuminates the social realities of inclusion of 16 high functioning children with autism (HFA) in public schools in the United States. The study suggests that the practice of inclusion rests primarily on unaffected schoolmates rather than teachers, who typically are occupied monitoring academic progress and disciplinary transgressions across a range of children. Utilizing ethnographic observations and video recordings of quotidian classroom and playground activities, the analysis elucidates how classmates employ a range of positive and negative inclusion practices that either integrate or distance autistic children. Ethnographic observations of the study population indicate that the children whose diagnosis was fully disclosed enjoyed more consistent social support in the classroom and on the school playground. The study further suggests that high functioning children with autism exhibit a range of reactions to negative inclusion practices such as rejection and scorn. Such reactions include oblivion, immediate behavioral response, and emotionally charged accounts of disturbing school incidents shared after-the-fact with family members. Significantly, these observations indicate that HFA children can be cognizant of and distressed by others’ derisive stances and acts, despite symptomatic difficulties in interpreting others’ intentions and feelings.

Detective Stories At Dinnertime: Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration

For over a year, our research groupl has been going into homes in the early evening for several hours, videoand audiorecording families eating dinner, relaxing, and putting children to bed. We are analyzing ways in which white, English-speaking American families varying in social class solve problems through talk. The present analysis is based on over a hundred hours of recorded interactions, approximately eight hours for each of 14 families (8 high SES and 6 low SES) from our initial corpus. In this paper, our focus is on narrative as a problem-solving discourse activity. Our concern is the interface of cognitive and social activity, as outlined in Vygotskian theory (Vygotsky 1978, 1981, Wertsch 1985, Rogoff & Lave 1984). Our data indicate how problem-solving through story-telling is

Autism and the Social World: An Anthropological Perspective

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: (1) participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; (2) formulating situational scenarios; and (3) interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding.

Limitations and transformations of habitus in Child-Directed Communication

This article offers an alternative approach to paradigms that cast culture solely as a nurturing influence on childrens language development. It proposes a dimensional model of Child-Directed Communication (CDC) to delineate ways in which a communitys habitus may impede the communicative potential of children with neuro-developmental conditions such as severe autism. It argues that certain features of Euro-American CDC are illadapted for autistic children. Due to inertia, caregivers often find themselves unable to transcend the limitations of CDC habitus. Yet, occasionally, a transformation in CDC emerges that more effectively engages children with impairments. The article analyzes one such transformation forged in the niche of a unique mother–son relationship in India and then introduced in the USA.

Introduction: morality as family practice:

A universal function of the family is to raise children to think and feel that resonate with notions of morality that relate to social situations, sp to expected and preferred modes of participation in these situations. As notes, ‘[N]one of the moral virtues arises in us by nature . . . [R]athe adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit’ (Aristo [4th century BCE]: 26). That is, children are born with a capacity for a knowledge and morality, but the flourishing of these qualities relies upon experiences with intimates. The prime intimate social unit is the famil members ideally provide secure environments that promote an openness about how one should treat other people, build social relationships, ena identities, and at the same time how one should apprehend and creative figure objects in the world. This is a tall order for families, and yet across the world’s societies, rarel ily members reflect upon and strategize about how to raise a moral, sent knowledgeable child beyond selection of and reliance upon children’s religious organizations, and other institutions outside the family. Yet, as th collected in this volume indicate, morality is embedded in and is an ou everyday family practices. The flow of social interactions involving ch imbued with implicit and explicit messages about right and wrong, be worse, rules, norms, obligations, duties, etiquette, moral reasoning, virt acter, and other dimensions of how to lead a moral life. While philosop bate the essence of morality, anthropologists and sociologists the socio configuration of morality, and psychologists the developmental progre morality, there is surprisingly little research on how morality is ena socialized through family interactions involving children. The presen provides five accounts of children’s immersion experiences in munda interactions with parents, which are imbued with moral expectations an ings and which apprentice children into moral life-worlds. 10.1177/ 0957926507069451

Introduction: Discourse and Autism:

which autism organizes discourse, and, in doing so, illuminates certain fundamental underpinnings of discourse competence. Autism is a neurological disorder that hinders social, cognitive, and emotional functioning of affected persons. Although most individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) suffer from mental retardation, roughly 25 percent have normal to above average intelligence (Wing, 1996; Wing and Attwood, 1987). This special issue analyzes conversational discourse involving children aged 8–12 years old who fall into this latter category – diagnosed as either high-functioning with autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS). Researchers have established that children with autism have relatively intact grammatical ability but display pragmatic impairments in language use (see Tager-Flusberg, 2000, for review). What our research has illuminated is that HFA and AS children appear to have less trouble with certain pragmatic dimensions of language than with others (Ochs et al., this issue; Ochs and Solomon, in press). In many respects, the discourse practices of these children appear undifferentiated from those unaffected by this disorder. For example, they are able to participate relatively competently in adjacency pair conversational sequences (Kremer-Sadlik, 2001, this issue), notice social rule violations (Sterponi, this issue), display politeness and empathy (Sirota, 2002, this issue), and launch narratives in conversation (Solomon, 2001, this issue). Yet in other ways, the discourse of these articulate children has a distinct quality: it is subtly but systematically different from unaffected discourse. Each article in this special issue delineates a range of competencies evidenced by HFA and AS children in specific areas of everyday social interaction. Examining question–answer sequences, politeness, accountability, and narrative, the contributors to this special issue address both the dimensions of social competence where the discourse of children with ASD is indistinguishable from 139