week 7 - INTERACTION NON-VOCAL EXPRESSION

Question 1

What knowledge does a language-user need to acquire in order to use language successfully?

Answer 1

Grice’s Maxims (1989):

Quantity
• Contribution should be as informative as necessary
• Contribution should not be more informative than necessary

Quality
• Do not say what you believe to be false
• Do not make claims for which you lack complete evidence

Relation
• Be relevant

Manner
• Avoid obscurity 
• Avoid ambiguity 
• Be brief 
• Be orderly

Question 2

when do children begin to understand grammar?

Answer 2

By age 6, children can understand humour and irony (Dews et al., 1996)
- As early as age 5, some children produce humour in their own speech (more common in boys; Groch, 1974)
→ Suggests that sophisticated communication skills are already established by around age 6

Question 3

what is humour?

Answer 3

cognitive skills + social skills + language skills → complex behaviour

• Reddy (2001) proposes that by 0;8 babies produce humour by repeating actions that make caregiver laugh
• Loizou (2005) observed that by 1;3-1;10, babies produce ‘jokes’ by violating expectations (e.g. by putting in appropriate objects in mouth and laughing)

Question 4

What kinds of humour are observed at 2-3 years?

Answer 4

Hoicka & Akhtar (2012)
47 children, either 2;0 and 3;0
Parental interviews on how their children used humour
10-min recorded interaction of joke-telling between parent and child

No effect for gender (contrasting with Groch, 1974) Strong effect for novelty and age
→ Children appear to acquire humour through copying
→ They soon extend this to novel instances of their own
→ By 2, children have acquired socio-cultural competence needed for humour
→ By 3, children have a sophisticated understanding of humour

Question 5

How and when does interaction begin?

Answer 5

Jaffe et al., 2001
Infants’ interaction with caregivers age 4 months predicts cognitive abilities at 1;0 Infants respond rhythmically to caregivers’ vocalizations at 4 months
Learning to interact takes place through early turn-taking with the caregiver

Question 6

what is the difference between referential speech and routine speech?

Answer 6

Referential speech:
◦ Naming objects, commenting on objects eg: bottle, red bottle
◦ Requires knowledge of the object eg. Know what that object is and the different versions that exist
◦ Context-flexible or context-dependent
◦ Competence-based

Routine speech: depends where you’re from
◦ Taking part in rehearsed routines, often with caregiver
◦ Requires knowledge of the routine – expectations are fixed
◦ Context-dependent only eg. Bath time words are only spoken at bath time
◦ Performance-based

Question 7

Communicative competence

eg?

Answer 7

understanding of linguistic rules and their appropriate social

◦ Bye bye + wave 
◦ Peekaboo + hands before eyes 
◦ Making a mistake → sorry 
◦ Receiving a gift → thank you 
◦ Requesting something → please 
◦ Pleased to meet you + handshake

Question 8

discuss a study bases around the development of fixed routines over time

Answer 8

Berko-Gleason & Weintraub (1976)
- 115 children age 2-15
- Tape-recording three households on
- Halloween as trick or treaters came and went
- How does the language of children and adults change as the child gets older?
- Trick or treat sequence: Only used on Halloween, completely inflexible.
3 nuclear utterances: trick or treat; thank you; goodbye

Children aged 2-3: stood silently
Children aged 4-5: remembered to say trick or treat
Children aged 10-11: said trick or treat and thank you
Children over 10: produced whole routine
Adults: coached, checked and reinforced

Question 9

what did Romaine say about communicative competence?

Answer 9

‘the range of sociolinguistic skills that children need to learn in order to be able to interpret and produce utterances, which are not only grammatical but also appropriate within particular contexts’ Romaine 1984:

Question 10

what do we need to be communicatively competent?

Answer 10

o An understanding of other people’s linguistic and social behaviours o An awareness of the speaker’s relative status, the roles and relationships they represent o An understanding of the cultural significance of these

Question 11

what did Hymes say about communicative competence?

Answer 11

Communicative competence is fourfold: Hymes, 1972

1. What is ‘systematically possible’ in the language
2. What is ‘psycholinguistically feasible’
3. What is ‘appropriate’
4. What actually occurs

Communicative competence: knowing ‘when to speak, when not to, what to talk about and with whom, when, and in what manner to interact’. (Hymes, 1972)

Setting and scene
Participants
Ends (goals and outcomes)
Act sequence (the order of the message form and its content)
Key (tone, manner, e.g. mocking)
Instrumentalities (channels and forms of speech, e.g. writing)
Norms of interaction (discourse rules of silence, interruption)
Genres
(SPEAKING)

Question 12

what did Saville-Troike say about Accounting for communicative competence

Answer 12

1982
A wide range of linguistic, interactional and cultural phenomena need to be accounted for in an adequate model of communicative competence:
1. Linguistic elements
- • Verbal elements • Non-verbal elements • Patterns / elements in particular speech events • Range of possible variants • Meaning of variants in particular situations

2. Interactional skills
   • Perception of salient features in communicative situations • Selection and interpretation of forms appropriate to specific situations (roles and relationships) • Norms of interaction and interpretation • Strategies for achieving goals
3. Cultural knowledge
   • Social structures • Values and attitudes • Cognitive maps and schemas • Enculturation processes (transmission of knowledge and skills)

Question 13

discuss accounting for communicative competence

Answer 13

Saville-Troike (1982)
Enculturation processes (transmission of knowledge and skills)
Language is central to the enculturation of children:
1. Part of the cultural body of knowledge, attitudes and skills transmitted to the next generation
2. A primary (though not the only) medium through which other aspects of culture are transmitted
3. A tool that children use to explore and manipulate the social environment and establish their status and role relationships within it

Question 14

if the end goal is fluency, what is fluency?

Answer 14

Distinction between how people speak their language and how well they speak it
‘Maximally gifted speaker’ (Fillmore, 1979):
1. To talk at length, fill time with talk
2. To talk in coherent, reasoned and semantically dense sentences, mastering the syntactic/semantic resources of the language
3. To have appropriate things to say in a wide range of contexts
4. To be creative and imaginative in language use

Question 15

what is Social-Pragmatic Development?

Answer 15

“The process of word learning is constrained by the child’s general understanding of what is going on in the situation in which she hears a new word” (Tomasello & Akhtar, 2000, p.5)

Joint attention
◦ Shared attention of two (or more) individuals on an object ◦ Eye-gaze, pointing, verbal cues ◦ Important for linguistic and non-linguistic learning

Question 16

How does amount of joint attention affect language learning?

Answer 16

Carpenter et al. (1998):
24 mother-infant duos, infant age 0;9 to 1;3 Videotaped interacting in a lab every month for 10 minutes
Amount of joint attention increased over time
Amount of infant communication (use of gestures, word comprehension, word production) also increased over time Amount of joint attention correlated with use of gestures, word comprehension, and word production

Question 17

joint attention

Answer 17

Joint attention or shared attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It is achieved when one individual alerts another to an object by means of eye-gazing, pointing or other verbal or non-verbal indications.