Effect of listener age and situation on the politeness of children's directives

James, Sharon L.

doi:10.1007/bf01068112

Cited by 76 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Experimental studies, in which children produced a variety of request forms while playing with puzzles (Bock and Hornsby, 1981) or interacting with dolls and puppets (James, 1978;Read and Cherry, 1978) have attested children's orientation to a number of contextual variables when making requests, such as social distance, age and gender.…”

Section: Children's Requestsmentioning

confidence: 98%

In/directness in Polish children's requests at the dinner table

Ogiermann

2015

Journal of Pragmatics

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Section: Children's Requestsmentioning

confidence: 98%

In/directness in Polish children's requests at the dinner table

Ogiermann

2015

Journal of Pragmatics

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“…James (1978) and Olson and Hildyard (1981) showed that more indirect (conventional) directive forms are used by 4-and 5-year-olds when they make requests of their superiors (adult, parent, teacher) than when they ask for something from a peer or a subordinate. ErvinTripp, O'Connor, and Rosenberg (1982) showed that between the ages of 2 to 3 and 5 to 8, children are more polite with the first member of each of the following pairs: their parents vs. other children, adults vs, children, older children vs. younger children, and their father vs. their mother, Politeness is manifested by the use of 'please' and of forms like 'Could you...?'…”

Section: General Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech acts by mother and child: Determining their nature and form

1993

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The goal of the present study was to determine to what extent the psychologica~social, and cultural features of the communication situation affect the production of speech acts during an interaction between an adult and a child. Variations in the nature of the speech acts produced (assertive, directive, expressive, and commissive) and in their linguistic form (imperative, declarative, interrogative, and exclamative) were studied in relation to three variables describing the communication situation: (a) a psychological variable, the mother's child-raising style (coercive or inductive) which wasassessed usinga questionnaire on parental control behavior (MCCP, Tessier, Pilon, & Fecteau, 1985); (b) a social variable, the social roleof the speaker (mother or child); and (c) a cultural variable, the origin of the dialogue partners (French or Canadian). Foreach cultural sample, I5-minute dialogues were recorded while 10 pairs of mothers in interaction with their 5 and 6 year old daughters performed a task involving drawing on a computer. The results suggest that for children between the ages of 5 and 6, the production of speech acts is mainly controlled by the social characteristics of the communication situation rather than by its psychological and culturalfeatures. Mothers appear instead to be sensitive to all three kinds of factors. Moreover, the four types of speech acts were found to differ in theirfrequency of occurrence, linguistic form, and reaction to the psychological, social; and cultural characteristics of the communication situation. Finally, this study suggests that the effects of these characteristics on speech act production are not uniform, but vary according to the index under consideration.

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“…These four categories were ordered from most to least polite precisely as predicted, with mean ratings of 53.8, 48.0, 34.7, and 15.0, F(3,44) = 18.56, p < 0.001. The nine requests studied in adults by Bates (1976), and the 14 requests studied by James (1978), who asked 40 adults to rate the 14 requests for politeness, can be classified on similar grounds. In both experiments, the politeness ratings support the cost-benefit theory.…”

Section: The Cost-benefit Theory Of Politenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politeness in requests: A rejoinder to Kemper and Thissen

Clark

Schunk

1981

Cognition

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Abstract:In our study "Polite responses to polite requests", 1 we reported four experiments. In Experiment 1, people rated the politeness of 18 types of indirect requests, such as Could you tell me where Jordan Hall is? In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, other people rated the politeness of various responses to these requests, such as Yes, I can-it's down the street and Down the street. From the findings, we argued two things. First, politeness is roughly accounted for by a cost-benefit theory of politeness. Second, understanding such requests appears to require understanding their direct as well as their indirect meanings. In their reply, Kemper and Thissen (1981) partially redid Experiment 1 and found certain apparent discrepancies. (They did not redo Experiments 2, 3, and 4, which were a major source of support for both of our conclusions.) From these discrepancies, they concluded, "A cost benefit analysis cannot, in general, account for politeness of a wide range of requests". They did not address our second conclusion.We suggest that Kemper and Thissen's conclusions are premature. The discrepancies they found are not replicated in six other investigations. When we tested their explanation for the discrepancies, it was decisively disconfirmed. More generally, the independent evidence for the cost-benefit theory of politeness is so extensive-quite apart from our own experiments-that Kemper and Thissen would need more than a partial failure to overturn it. Article:Kemper and Thissen's apparent discrepancies When we first examined Kemper and Thissen's data, their discrepant findings didn't seem to make sense. So we redid their experiment. In our original experiment, we had asked 30 people each to rate 54 requests, three each of 18 types; the 54 requests each asked for a different piece of information. Kemper and Thissen had asked 20 people to rate only one instance each of the 18 types of requests, and all 18 requests were for the same piece of formation. Did this change in procedure matter? To find out, we had 36 Stanford University students each rank order 18 requests, one of each type, for politeness; all 18 requests asked for the location of nearby Candlestick Park. The students judged how polite the request would be if they were asked it by another student with whom they were acquainted but not close friends.The results of this experiment do not favor Kemper and Thissen. The 18 mean ranks were, first of all, highly reliable, with a coefficient of reliability of 0.99. These mean ranks correlated 0.88 with our original ratings, but only 0.69 with Kemper and Thissen's (which themselves correlated only 0.40 with our original ratings). The difference between 0.88 and 0.69 is significant, t(15)= 2.19, < 0.05.Previously published data do not favor Kemper and Thissen either. Mohan (1974) asked 80 people to judge the politeness of 27 requests (all requesting the same action). Seven of Mohan's request types were among Kemper and Thissen's selection, and five were among ours. Mohan's ratings correlated 0.83 with our origina...

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Effect of listener age and situation on the politeness of children's directives

Cited by 76 publications

References 3 publications

In/directness in Polish children's requests at the dinner table

In/directness in Polish children's requests at the dinner table

Speech acts by mother and child: Determining their nature and form

Politeness in requests: A rejoinder to Kemper and Thissen

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