| 其他摘要 | The conversational skill is an important aspect of children’s language development. During the process of language acquisition, children not only need to acquire phonology, grammar, and semantics, but also need to learn how to use language for communication. Children’s conversational skills reflect not only the development of their language skills, but also the development of their social skills. The conversation is a dynamic interactive process, in which the speakers and listeners alternately transfer and receive information in contexts. The temporal organization reflects the participants’ coordination in conversation beyond speech and becomes a crucial window to study the conversation process.
Most of the previous research has explored children’s development of conversational skills based on the conversational acts, lacking the investigation from the perspective of conversation’s dynamic process and temporal organization. Based on the corpus of the adult-elicited conversation data of children age 4-6 years with their peers, the present study designed three studies to explore the development of children’s conversational acts in the whole conversation process including initiation, response, re-initiation and re-response. In order to explore the development of children’s temporal organization in conversations, the present study examined children’s turn-taking intervals and their coordination with other participants in turn- taking. The development of children’s conversational acts and temporal organization in different conversational contexts were investigated as well.
The present study analyzed the adult-elicited conversation data of 90 children age 4-6 years with their peers. Study 1 explored the development of children’s conversational acts and the relationship with relevant linguistic characteristics. The results showed that children had increased skills of turn-taking, topic selection and maintenance, and repairs with age; they also had increased conversational dominance and assertiveness, indicating children’s gradually increasing participation and initiative in conversations. However, there was no significant age difference in 4- to 6-year-old children’s response problems. In addition, children’s syntactic abilities were positively correlated with the mean length of the conversational turns and the number of topic maintenance acts. The correlation patterns had developmental differences in conversations. As the core of the conversation, turn-taking was significantly positively correlated with other conversational acts.
Study 2 explored the development of children’s temporal organization by examining the developmental characteristics of turn-taking intervals and the relationships between different participants’ turn-taking intervals in conversations. The results showed that the numbers of between-speaker silences gradually increased and the durations gradually decreased with age. The numbers of children’s utterance overlaps gradually increased during the session, and the durations showed a tendency with increase in 5-year-olds and decrease in 6-year-olds. This result indicates that preschoolers are still in the process of mastering the “one speaker at a time” principle of conversation and coordination with other speakers. In addition, we found the significant correlations among children’s turn-taking intervals, their syntactic abilities and conversational acts. These correlations showed the developmental differences. We found the significant positive correlations between the durations of different participants’ turn-taking intervals in conversations, but no age difference was found in these correlations.
Study 3 explored the development of children’s conversational acts and temporal organization in different conversational contexts. Sub-study 3 examined the development of children’s conversational acts and temporal organization in different topics. Sub-study 4 examined the development of children’s temporal organization in adult’s different question complexity. The results showed that compared to talking about low-interaction topics, children produced more clauses, turns, topic selection and maintenance acts, repairs and between-speaker silences, and longer between- speaker silences in high-interaction topics. Compared to open-ended questions, children aged 4-6 years had shorter between-speaker silences in “yes/no” questions. Older children had shorter between-speaker silences in open-ended questions than younger children. When answering different open-ended questions, children aged 4-6 years showed the developmental difference in the durations of between-speaker silences.
The findings of the present study provide crucial empirical data for the studies on the development of preschool children’s conversational acts and temporal organization, as well as an important theoretical and empirical basis for child-friendly human-computer interaction systems. |
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