Haydée Marcos

Reformulating requests at 18 months : gestures, vocalizations and words

The present study focuses on reformulation of requests for objects in 18-month-olds as a function of mothers responses to the first formulation. Failures due to no response (non-acknowledgement) are contrasted with failures due to misunderstanding (request for clarification). Coding was carried out in two phases. The first phase consisted of categorizing each motor and vocal behaviour produced by each subject. The second phase consisted of categorizing reformulations, i.e. the shift between the behavioural pattern for a given formulation and the pattern characterizing the subsequent formulation. The findings suggest that in this transitional period, gestures and words play complementary roles with respect to the two components - regulation and referencing - of the act of requesting an object.

Young children's communication with mothers and fathers: Functions and contents

The objective of this research is to test whether the contents and functions of young childrens communication with fathers and mothers differ. Categories based on Speech Act Theory were used for the analysis of functions. As regards contents, messages were classified into three categories: (1) messages which refer to objects, actions or evaluations linked to task performance; (2) messages linked to characteristics of referents which are not linked to task performance; and (3) expressions of internal emotional states. The functions and contents of messages were analysed in two populations: American and French. Children were aged 20 to 26 months and were observed playing with a standard set of toys with each parent separately. The results show that fathers produce more messages linked to task performance and tend to produce more action directives than mothers and that, similarly, children produce more messages linked to task performance and more action directives with fathers than with mothers. Therefore, it seems that as young as 2 years of age, children adjust their communicative behaviours to fit characteristics of the interlocutor. Differences between the populations as well as the more precise nature of mother-child communication are also discussed.

Dialogical factors in toddlers’ use of clitic pronouns

Young (1;9—2;4) children’s use of third person clitic subject pronouns in natural dialogues was examined in both longitudinal and cross-sectional data. Considering that young children mainly use pronouns in the context of referential continuity, this study aims at identifying some of the factors that affect this use. Two possible dialogical factors are examined: (1) the use of clitic pronouns can be interpreted as a reproduction of the adult’s discourse, either by taking up whole utterances containing a pronoun or by taking up only the clitic pronouns without reproducing the adult’s utterance. (2) The use of pronouns could be driven by pragmatic-discursive factors. In order to assess this hypothesis the use of clitic pronouns was observed in the context of dialogical continuity. Three kinds of links were considered: children repeat or reformulate the adult’s utterances, add a new predication on the same topic, or establish a contrast. The results suggest that the reproduction of the adult’s utterance does not significantly influence children’s use of pronouns, whereas pragmatic-discursive factors are found to affect their choice of referential expressions.

Comprehension of directives in young children: influence of social situation and linguistic form

The purpose of this study was to analyse the emergence and development of the ability to relate message form to the production context during the transition between the prelinguistic period and the linguistic period. The study focuses on utterances used to express a request, directly or indirectly. Two groups of 20 children aged 1;7 and 2;5 were observed in a play situation with the experimenter who produced four types of requests: imperative, embedded imperative, expression of a desire and question directive. Each type of utterance was produced twice, once referring to an object that was relevant to the current activity and once referring to an object that was irrelevant. The main results showed that (1) the context of the utterance had an influence on the childrens responses by the middle of the second year, and (2) children aged two-and-a-half are able to relate the context of an utterance to its form.

Adult Responses to Young Children's Communicative Gestures: Joint Achievement of Speech Acts

During the period of transition between prelinguistic and linguistic communication (the second year of life) the communicative signals are mostly non-conventionalized and their semiotic power is relatively low. In this paper, communication sequences observed at 16 and 22 months are analysed in order to determine how the partners joint communicative activity allows the sharing of intentions conveyed by gestural and/or vocal signals. The adults responses to two types of gestures - holding out an object and pointing - during joint play were analysed. In addition, the discussion of a series of examples shows the part played by the adult in the performance of relatively complex speech acts. These analyses suggest that the adult partners interpretation of the childs intention depends on several cues: who is currently carrying out the activity and how, the childs age and, in some cases, already existing routines. The respective roles of gestures and speech when produced in conjunction with each other are discussed.

Introduction: early pragmatic development

The idea of creating a Special Issue of Fir-st Language to present some recent research on early pragmatic development was motivated by the fact that communicative development during the first three or four years of life poses a number of specific questions. During the earliest phases, the main questions concern the emergence of the intent to communicate and the appearance of the attribution of communicative intentions to interlocutors. In addition to these funda-