Child Language Socialization: Parental Speech and Interactional Strategies

CHILD LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION: PARENTAL SPEECH AND INTERACTIONAL STRATEGIES Ben G. Blount & Willett Kempton Introduction. Parents regularly use in their speech to young children features that mark the speech as appropriate for children. Features such as exaggerated intonation, lengthened vowel, repetition, and imitation occur frequently, and they all appear to foster interaction between parents or caretakers and young children. Not all features, however, function in the same way to promote and sustain interaction. Some prosodic and paralinguistic features -- those involving dimensions of tone, duration, pitch, phonetic quality, volume -- seem primarily to convey affect, and they are used by parents to attract children's attention. Other features are more directly interactional in character, relating to the sequences of vocalizations by interacting parents and children. Repetition of an utterance and an adult's imitation of a child's vocalizations are examples. These features appear to function primarily to direct children's attention to speech as an activity, Still other features are used to relate the speech activity to the environment in meaningful, referential ways. Once a child's attention has been captured and focussed on the activity of speaking, parents may treat the children's utterances as meaningful when it is not clear that any reference was intended at all. This paperlexamines the distribution of prosodic, paralinguistic , and interactional features in the speech of Englishspeaking and of Spanish-speaking parents. An entailment analysis of thirty-four speech features is carried out to identify patterns of usage. Parental strategies are identified in Sign Language Studies 12 relation to the usage patterns, and the strategies are viewed in developmental terms. The differential use of speech features is related to the parents' interactional strategies on the one hand and to the children's interactional competence on the other. We should make clear at the outset that we are primarily concerned with identifying distributional patterns. From those, we infer what strategies parents use for communication with children. Although the strategies are marked and differentiated by prosodic, paralinguistic, and interactional features, we do not claim that parents have a clear awareness of their inventory of features and that they use them in a calculated , deliberative fashion. To the contrary, direct questioning of parents as to what they do speech-wise does not yield interesting information. Even though clear patterns can be found in their usage of features, they do not recognize the patterns and certainly cannot verbalize them. The source of the patterns is complex and involves multiple factors. We argue that the patterns are conditioned by parental choices of interaction strategies and that the utilization of specific features is the result of culturally patterned ways of speaking to children. Those ways of speaking are, in turn, related to the overall communicative competence of children, specifically in terms of what they perceive and react to in parental speech. Language acquisition and parental speech. The human infant must learn a considerable amount about the physical and social world around him before he can make the transition to childhood. An important part of his learning is the realization that he can use language for communication, that vocalizations can be controlled and that they can be employed to affect the behavior of others in the environment. The structure of the language itself must be learned, at least in rudimentary form, for normal communication to develop. Much of the research on child language acquisition during the past decade has focussed on that aspect -- the emergence of linguistic structure. While important questions remain about how children discover the relevant distinctions and rules about the grammar of their language, there has been a growing recognition that children learn other, basic, communicative skills and that children acquire competence to communicate according to social conventions and rules (Cicourel 1969, Hymes 1962, Blount & Kempton Ervin-Tripp 1973a, Brukman 1973, Wells 1974). They must learn how to interact, how verbal behavior is organized in terms of rounds and turn-taking (Blount 1972), and how variation in form and content of their utterances can be used to achieve desired communicative results (Ervin-Tripp 1973b). Once acquisition is well under way, children can then learn subtle distinctions about how their linguistic repertoires can be used creatively in social contexts to...