Dynamics of Family Interaction: Infancy and Language Acquisition
From Studyplace
These are notes I'm taking for Professor Varenne's class on the Dynamics of Family Interaction. I'm using it as an opportunity to play around with wikis and shared community knowledge. Please feel free to contribute to these notes or share your ideas about how it can be expanded, changed, improved.
Contents |
[edit] Infancy and language acquisition: Learning, participation and the children's struggle as they play and resist
[edit] Readings
- Ochs, Elinor and Bambi Schieffelin "Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications." in Culture theory. Edited by R. Shweder and R. LeVine, 276-320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984
[edit] Reading notes
[edit] Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications.
- culture seen as something separate from language acquisition
- authors claim:
- language acquisition affected by process of becoming a member of society
- process of becoming member affected by language (its function, interpretations in different contexts, etc.)
- child as language use a relatively recent development
- focus on:
- relation between relative complexity of conceptual categories and linguistic structures produced by young learners at different developmental stages
- processes children use to construct grammar
- extent to which these processes are universal or particular
- extent to which these processes support existence of language faculty
- prerequisites of language development
- perceptual/conceptual factors that inhibit/facilitate language development
- Skinner's view that language learning more about responding to stimuli was challenged by Chomsky's innatist views on the language faculty
- through exposure to adult language, child selects from universal grammar the principles specific to the language to be acquired
- challenges to innatist view:
- Chomsky's theory doesn't explain how child acquires grammar
- adult speech seen as "degenerate" and ill-formed; has no empirical basis; studies later show that adults modify their language into baby-talk register
- some studies show adults adjust langauge-specific features
- other studies show adults adjust langauge to child's cognitive and linguistic abilities
- adults use verbal strategies to understand child's communication, e.g. looking at where the child is looking, repeating what the child has said, supplying missing information
- protoconversation: takes place when one party responds with some way (facial, verbal, etc.)
- parents may adopt meanings to child's behaviors, socializing her into a set of interpretations
- research on babytalk often comes from white middle class families, but not characteristic of all societies or social classes
- ethnographic research relies on observation, formal/informal elicitation of member views
- with psychological research, subject, researcher and reader tends to be of teh same social group so researcher not faced with cultural translation
- cultures and language as bodies of knowledge, structures of understanding
- A: similar to Gee's big-D Discourse
- researcher feels that culture cannot be separated from accounts of caregiver-child interaction
- Goffman: it may be difficult for us to break out of our cultural frame; norms can be made explicit when there are violations
- another way is to observe other societies
- process of becoming social is culturally constructed
- Anglo-American white middle-class development story
- research often see mothers as primary caregiver; focus on mother-child interactions
- mothers treat babies as social beings and addressee in social interaction
- mother takes perspective of the child
- family accomodates life around child; child is focus of attention
- child kept dependent on accomodations for a period of time
- adult lowers speech to child's perceived abilities
- adult also richly expresses child's communicative abilities, as if the child meant all those meanings
- adult helps child finish task and gives her credit
- adult interprets unintelligible utterances
- child learns that utterances may not immediately be understood; of ways to deal with ambiguity; and who can make interpretations and how they are open for other interpretations
- Kaluli developmental story
- Kaluli live in tropical rain forest in south highlands of Papua New Guinea
- most are monolingual, with 60-90 living in a longhouse; often a dozen may be living in a semi-partitioned room
- talk a main indicator of social competence
- mothers very attentive to child, never leaving them alone, even when involved in other activities; however, they never treat them as conversationalists; never gaze at each other
- mothers use high nasal voice to speak for the child, but uses a well-formed language like that of an older child
- Kaluli do not try to speak or interpret another person's thinking
- mother uses "one-liners" with child for action or termination of an action
- Kaluli claim that language begins when baby uses crucial words for "mother" and "breast"
- mothers push child into interactional situations instead of shaping the situation to fit the child
- Kaluli often indicate source of information when speaking and this is part of child's socialization during early speech
- Samoan developmental story
- research done in Western Samoa
- Samoan society is highly stratified, with status and titles used
- child typically cared for by older siblings
- child spends most time with siblings
- child is talked about; language addressed to infant often in song or rhythmic vocalizations
- interpretations not addressed to the child but older members of the household
- verbal environment changes when child begins to crawl; expected to go to parents on their own
- once child is mobile, caregivers treat them as troublemakers, often using negative tones to reprimand; don't simplify speech
- first word a curse word used to reject the action of another
- child exposed to social stratification during caregiving conversational sequences (p. 296)
- burden of understanding depends on status of speaker
- for Samoans there isn't a series of intentions and motivations behind acts; caregivers do not try to hypothesize utterances, instead treat them as clear or not clear
- there are no "biologically designed choreography" in infant-caregiver interactions
- language input should not be limited to simply those directed at the child
- understanding of caregiver register as a sociological phenomenon
- when describing caregiver-child interaction, need to take into account cultural knowledge and expectations
- generalizations of goals between behavior and goals of caregivers and young children does not signify equivalence of particular goals across social groups
- often cultural patterns as not conscious
- "same" structure can have different functions in different contexts
- researchers suggest that caregivers who orient situation towards child will tend ot use more simplified, baby-talk register, while those who adapt child to situation will model for the child to follow
- children may acquire forms in a subset of contexts that has been given priority by members (p. 309)
- socialization not a fixed pattern of behavior; it is continuous and open-ended
[edit] Class notes
Link to Professor Varenne's notes
- traditional belief that ideas get set in the early childhood years; that language development stops at an early age
- 1940s-50s: fight among psychologists about how humans learn to talk
- Skinner: you learn to speak because you hear other humans speak; doesn't explain what people do with language
- V: how do children learn pronouns/deictic? learning how to take other people's position
- Chomsky: transformational grammar; we are all born with capacity for language; once it is triggered by sensory exposure, your brain will start picking up language; all human languages are essentially the same
- Chomsky went back to Cartesian linguistics; deductive
- V: who speaks what to whom may be a matter of social relations
- by age 2-3, children already know grammatical patterns and overgeneralize rules in irregular verbs
- documented cases of children inventing their own language based on ones they know
- Chomsky: "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"; grammatically correct but "makes no sense"
- caregivers trigger language during first six months, otherwise capacity disappears
- 1960s: first theories that almost any interaction will trigger language
- some researchers think that children who are not exposed to enough language will not do as well in school (e.g. Black children did not hear good language)
- Labov: had Black schoolchildren in Philadelphia carry around tape recorders in their backpacks; contrary to what was believed, showed that Black children spoke a lot when not around teachers
- historian P. Aries: looked at how children are dressed as marking of separate stage
- V: how to parents learn about children; most have not taken classes in child development
- almost every language has a babytalk register
- V: should view the child not as ignorant but as active and teaching
- why is there a range of age where children are toilet-trained
- toilet-training about what parents are willing to do
- V: what is speaking? what counts as speaking?
- studies in intonation; you will learn how to say a sentence before you know how to say a word
- maybe children speak sooner than we give them credit for because researchers tend to be more interested in semantics
- V: are we fitting child to culture, or culture to child?
- Mead: babies of each society wriggle in a slightly different way
- V: so much emphasis in development about learning to fit into a culture but not on resistance; given one set of rules, child might resist in one way or another way
- V: Jacques Ranciere; parent and child instruct one another continuously
- at some point, humans evolved the ability to read and use language
- Rousseau: should never teach a child how to read before 12
- child psychologists suggest reading to a child as soon as possible
- V: what is the practice of literacy? what is reading?
