Lecture 14 Flashcards
What are the two different ways of conceptualising dialogue?
Individualistically; two separate beings interacting
Dialogically; this is the theory of the dialogical self
Discuss dialogue in relation to voice
Bakhtin’s notion of voices states that thought is heteroglossic meaning that every piece of dialogue is multivoiced and is infused with shared thoughts.
Why does the absence of dialogue matter to us?
Because it can cause categorisation/objectification, invisibility and exclusion. We need dialogue to get through everyday interactions and to form close bonds. Dialogue is important for babies also. Hadjidakis believes that infants talk to find meaning in their feelings. If someone is open to a child and addresses them, their range of vocalisations in the first year of life expand more.
Discuss being looked at
Farroni et al. found that when babies are 2-5 days old, they develop a preference of being looked at. When looked at, the gaze at the individual for longer and perform more orientations towards the gazer. This then develops into emotional reactions after 2-3 months. The babies begin to smile, act distressed if unable to escape interaction, have indifferent avoidance (gaining interests and views) and ambivalent/coy smiles.
Discuss some dialogical phenomena
Infants can perceive multimodular redundancy in speech. For example, at 4 months, they have a visual preference for matched mouth shape and vowel sound. At 5 months, they have visual preferences for people who have matched mouth opening speed and speech amplitude. Synchronous mouth and voice improves imitation in children also.
Another dialogical phenomena is the fact that we naturally perform multimodal motherese (matching gestures with words via intensity, rythym etc.).
Merleau-Ponty claims that mind and body aren’t separate things, they are one that form structure. There is a common ground between the two, allowing for the synchrony of gestures and vocalisations.
Affect attunement; this is the fact that two individuals can interact in tune with one another, for example, turn taking, signals when to take your turn and sharing rhythms.
At two months, babies are able to turn take and show pre-speech movements which are the basic structures of a conversation.
List some structural features of dialogue
Communicative acts like gestures or expressions.
Self synchrony; organised and coherent actions
Interactive synchrony
Turn taking
Attentional coordination; directing your attention to the speaker for example
Reference; ability to refer to things
Information content; ability to refer information about things
Symbolism
Grammatical competence
Socio-linguistic competence like social rules
Discuss the viewpoints about turn taking in mothers and babies
Bateson believed in protoconversation which is the interaction between a mother and child before the onset of language, it consists of words, sounds and gestures in an attempt to convey meaning.
Trivarthen believed in primary intersubjectivity which is a form of non-verbal turn taking. It involves the baby imitating the person it’s interacting with, for example face to face mirroring.
Another type of turn taking was suggested by Kaye and Wells. It involves mothers jiggling the milk bottle during pauses of suckling in order to signify for the babies to suckle again.
What is interpersonal contingency?
Discuss arguments
Interpersonal contingency is basically the linkage between your acts and another’s. Therefore, a babies social behaviour could be explained via this instead of saying that their intentions are to converse. For example, babies may be able to recognise temporal contingency between them kicking and the effect of this, e.g. the mother’s response. Studies have been carried out to test for this; still face and double video studies. The still face study shows that if an infants behaviour isn’t met with a response from the mother, then the infant will become wary and stop ‘conversing’, supporting the idea that the infant is responding to the mother/wants to turn-take. However, some people, like Gergely, argue that this is supportive for the contingency idea. The double video studies have shown contradicting findings also; Murray and Trevarthon found that infants can discriminate between interactions in real life vs through a tv, due to lack of contingency. However, Rochat et al. did not find the same effect even when including extra variables like still faces, as it did not affect the infants behaviour, showing how the infants were purely just responding and interacting with the mother’s behaviour and not expecting any effect. However, an infants behaviour could also just be considered as them learning to respond appropriately to how the mother acts, e.g. affective mirroring (Legerstee et al.).
Discuss adults responding to infants
There are many cultural differences in this, however, mother’s respond to their child within a second across almost all cultures. The differences emerge in how the mothers respond. Richman et al found that in Kenya, mother respond physically but Western mothers respond verbally. Kaertner et al found that indian mothers respond in a vestibular sense (touch). Also, infants have a preference towards the type of contingent response when around strangers (Bigelow et al.).
What is secondary intersubjectivity?
It’s a type of intentional behaviour that emerges after primary intersubjectivity. It involves an adult and an object, for example pointing at something. There has been a lot of research about infant pointing and there are many different types, like proto-declarative pointing, it’s repeated until success occurs.
List 2 metaphors about intentional communication
The telegraph metaphor: Intentional communication requires a message, a sender and a receiver. However, it ignore the emergence of communication.
The orchestra metaphor: There needs to be multiple participants that are capable and are motivated to connect. However, this metaphor ignores the sequential aspect of conversation.
