Interactive communication between children: learning how to make language work in dialogue

Anderson, Anne H.; Clark, Aileen; Mullin, Jim

doi:10.1017/s030500090000934x

Cited by 34 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…taking the child's knowledge into account. For example, Anderson, Clark, and Mullin (1994) found that where speakers checked the addressee's understanding of new referents when introducing them, performance on the Map Task tended to be better. The second aim was to examine children's ability to maintain task focus.…”

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confidence: 99%

Parent‐child interaction and road behaviour: An exploratory study

Dunbar

Lewis

Hill

2002

British J of Dev Psycho

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The relationship between parent‐child interaction and child pedestrian behaviour was investigated by comparing parent‐child communication to road‐crossing behaviour. Forty‐four children and their parents were observed carrying out a communication task (the Map Task), and were covertly filmed crossing roads around a university campus. The Map Task provided measures of task focus and sensitivity to another's current knowledge, which we predicted would be reflected in road‐crossing behaviour. We modelled indices of road behaviour with factor scores derived from a principal‐component analysis of communication features, and background variables including the age, sex and traffic experience of the child, and parental education. A number of variables were significantly related to road crossing, including the age and sex of the child, the length of the conversation, and specific conversational features such as the checking and clarification of uncertain information by both parent and child. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

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confidence: 99%

Parent‐child interaction and road behaviour: An exploratory study

Dunbar

Lewis

Hill

2002

British J of Dev Psycho

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“…And so on up the age range this flow is assumed to take place but only a longitudinal study could confirm such a hypothesis. However, results from a cross-sectional study by Anderson, Clark & Mullin (1994), using a more collaborative map task with pairs of same-aged children, indicate that there are as many as 25% of the oldest group of children (13 years) who are performing below the average level of the youngest children (7 years). This implies that there is a substantial minority of children who fail to improve their communicative skills with age.…”

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confidence: 99%

The growth of speaker and listener skills from five to eleven years

1998

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The development of children's ability to become effective speakers and listeners once they have acquired language has been widely investigated using the referential communication paradigm. However, there has not been a systematic investigation of these abilities across the entire primary school age range. Given the importance of oral information in the classroom, the facility with which children encode and decode messages autonomously needs to be known. A balanced sample, with respect to age, sex and socio-economic status (SES), of 578 children (5-11 years) was given a 35-item test of speaker and listener skills using a variety of pictorial material. Results, which were scored using a response coding scheme, showed that the ability to respond as listeners to accurate messages was generally good, but significant improvement took place between 5 and 8 years. Speaker skills and listener skills were closely correlated, although only when the message received was ambiguous and required missing information to be sought. Average performance was initially at a low level (10% at 5 years, 18% at 6 years) and did not reach the 50% level of success until 9 years. Even by the end of the primary school period, accuracy was less than 70% of the possible score. Significant differences as a function of age and SES, but not sex, are reported. The reasons for, and the practical implications of, the protracted growth of these pragmatic skills are discussed.

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“…eye contact between speakers), and how these interacted with linguistic realisations (including speakers' use of contrastive stress). Subsequently, the Map Task has been widely used to support the study of spontaneous speech and communication by children (Anderson et al , 1992Doherty-Sneddon & Kent 1996) and adults Boyle et al 1994;Davies 1997;Kowtko 1997;Sotillo 1997). It has seen particular service in exploring the communication of atypical language users, including sleep-deprived soldiers (Bard et al 1996) and aphasic individuals (Anderson et al 1997;Beeke et al 1996;Merrison 2002).…”

Section: The Map Task: Data Generation and Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing ‘understanding’ in dialogue interpreting

Turner¹,

Merrison

2016

INTP

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This paper asks what 'understanding' looks like in the presence of an interpreter. Much investigation of understanding in Interpreting Studies explores claims which treat it as axiomatic, rather than exploring the occurrence of comprehension itself (how participants come to accept that it is occurring, what form it takes, what its consequences are). Here we repurpose a well-established research tool -the Map Task -to illustrate a robustly empirical approach to this issue, using complex multimodal and multilingual data. The Map Task, we contend, can play a potentially groundbreaking role in Interpreting Studies, mitigating the constraint created by the uniqueness of each interpreted exchange which otherwise hinders generalisability and theoretical expansion. In particular, we argue that the way interpreters and service users, through their talk, bring themselves collectively to points of assumed shared understanding is illuminated with particular clarity through the Map Task lens. Research within this paradigm, we suggest, may help to enable further development of Interpreting Studies, affording an opportunity to deepen our communal understanding of the collaborative and interactive nature of meaning-making in interpreted exchanges, starting with the recognition that what understanding consists of is, in essence, what interlocutors treat as understanding.

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Interactive communication between children: learning how to make language work in dialogue

Cited by 34 publications

References 22 publications

Parent‐child interaction and road behaviour: An exploratory study

Parent‐child interaction and road behaviour: An exploratory study

The growth of speaker and listener skills from five to eleven years

Doing ‘understanding’ in dialogue interpreting

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