“…In their review of the literature on language acquisition and language socialization, Brown and Gaskins () addressed key issues related to what counts as relevant speech for vocabulary learning, noting the conflict between, on the one hand, findings that speech addressed to the child predicts lexical development and, on the other hand, findings that young children in societies where they are seldom spoken to nonetheless attain linguistic milestones at comparable rates. They suggested a resolution to this puzzle by reference to studies of societies in which children are socialized to attend intently to what is going on around them; such children may “be attuned to attend to others’ language and interactions, and be able to profit from overheard speech in ways unlike those of infants in societies where child‐centered face‐to‐face interactions are the norm” (p. 201).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The second area has to do with determining the different kinds of attentional and learning strategies and associated benefits that are cultivated when children are routinely exposed to different kinds of social configurations and normative language practices other than predominantly child‐directed speech (Brown & Gaskins, ). For example, when referring to recent studies that show relations between child‐directed speech and later vocabulary size but not for overheard speech and later vocabulary size (Shneidman & Goldin‐Meadow, ; Shneidman et al., ; Weisleder & Fernald, ), Brown and Gaskins added an important caveat:However, these studies treat all speech not directly addressed to the child as “overheard,” ignoring the fact that much of the speech (e.g., of adults on the phone, or adult–adult conversations) is irrelevant to the child who may well not be actually “overhearing” it.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The evidence from this body of work runs parallel to the foregoing summary of cross‐cultural research: The middle‐class model of dyadic speech in which the parent speaks directly to the child and treats him as a conversational partner is neither common nor necessary for language learning (Duranti et al., ; Ochs & Schieffelin, ). In societies in which young children are seldom spoken to, they nonetheless reach major milestones of language development at ages comparable to those of Western children (Brown & Gaskins, ). Moreover, these sources attest that most young children spend their daily lives in multiparty social constellations that afford a range of normative participant roles (Goffman, ), especially bystander and overhearer roles.…”
Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years of life. The five studies combined ethnographic fieldwork with longitudinal home observations of 42 children (18-48 months) interacting with family members in everyday life contexts. Results do not support Hart and Risley's claim, reveal substantial variation in vocabulary environments within each socioeconomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the number of words to which low-income children are exposed.
“…In their review of the literature on language acquisition and language socialization, Brown and Gaskins () addressed key issues related to what counts as relevant speech for vocabulary learning, noting the conflict between, on the one hand, findings that speech addressed to the child predicts lexical development and, on the other hand, findings that young children in societies where they are seldom spoken to nonetheless attain linguistic milestones at comparable rates. They suggested a resolution to this puzzle by reference to studies of societies in which children are socialized to attend intently to what is going on around them; such children may “be attuned to attend to others’ language and interactions, and be able to profit from overheard speech in ways unlike those of infants in societies where child‐centered face‐to‐face interactions are the norm” (p. 201).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The second area has to do with determining the different kinds of attentional and learning strategies and associated benefits that are cultivated when children are routinely exposed to different kinds of social configurations and normative language practices other than predominantly child‐directed speech (Brown & Gaskins, ). For example, when referring to recent studies that show relations between child‐directed speech and later vocabulary size but not for overheard speech and later vocabulary size (Shneidman & Goldin‐Meadow, ; Shneidman et al., ; Weisleder & Fernald, ), Brown and Gaskins added an important caveat:However, these studies treat all speech not directly addressed to the child as “overheard,” ignoring the fact that much of the speech (e.g., of adults on the phone, or adult–adult conversations) is irrelevant to the child who may well not be actually “overhearing” it.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The evidence from this body of work runs parallel to the foregoing summary of cross‐cultural research: The middle‐class model of dyadic speech in which the parent speaks directly to the child and treats him as a conversational partner is neither common nor necessary for language learning (Duranti et al., ; Ochs & Schieffelin, ). In societies in which young children are seldom spoken to, they nonetheless reach major milestones of language development at ages comparable to those of Western children (Brown & Gaskins, ). Moreover, these sources attest that most young children spend their daily lives in multiparty social constellations that afford a range of normative participant roles (Goffman, ), especially bystander and overhearer roles.…”
Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years of life. The five studies combined ethnographic fieldwork with longitudinal home observations of 42 children (18-48 months) interacting with family members in everyday life contexts. Results do not support Hart and Risley's claim, reveal substantial variation in vocabulary environments within each socioeconomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the number of words to which low-income children are exposed.
“…These findings underscore an important direction for future research: to better understand how children make sense of their world, studies of language learning and moral socialization would benefit greatly from encompassing a full range of participant roles beyond the child‐centered and child‐directed interaction norm. Attentive listening and observing should also be regarded as moral, social, and cognitive abilities (Brown and Gaskins ; Fung, Miller, and Lin ; Miller et al. ; Sperry, Sperry, and Miller ).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The discursive practice approach privileges the analysis of speech events (Hymes ), which are “beyond lexical and grammatical meaning to encompass how speech forms implicitly index or point to dimensions of interactional and sociocultural context” (Miller , 418). Moreover, “it is crucial that events singled out for micro‐analysis are representative of patterns in everyday life” (Brown and Gaskins , 210). The presumption of the current study is that children acquire moral knowledge of hierarchy through participating in recurrent semiotically mediated events of embodied deference rituals in daily family interactions, which are situated in multileveled contexts and open to observation and interpretation (Fader ; Fung , ; Goodnow, Miller, and Kessel ).…”
Section: Socializing Practices Of Embodied Deference Rituals During Cmentioning
By adopting a discursive practice approach, this work examines how embodied deference rituals were practiced by Vietnamese children in the Mekong Delta region. Sixty‐two video‐recorded events of vòng tay/khoanh tay performed by 23 children (ages 1.5 to 12 years) were identified; of those, 51 events performed by 12 preschool‐aged children were most rigorous and demanding. On the occasions of greeting/departing, thanking, and apology/discipline and through various communicative channels, four‐generation caregivers played different roles to coach children in proper postural display and verbal respect with affection. Children actively participated in these recurrent family interactions and acquired the cultural meaning of affection‐laden social hierarchy at a young age. Such socialization practices ensure the stability of a hierarchical structure, strengthen the mutual bond between novices and their seniors or superiors, and lay the sociocultural foundation of politeness, filial piety, and sacrifice in the family and in society at large.[affection, embodied moral socialization, social hierarchy, Vietnamese children]
Language socialization is the study of the socialization of language and socialization through language. It encompasses both a theoretical approach and a method for studying human development in cultural contexts. Language socialization enjoins the ethnographic, microanalytic, and longitudinal investigation of learners of any age, presupposing a comparative approach to the study of human development. Given the assumption that learning occurs only within culturally defined contexts, language socialization relies on the ability of language in use to index meaning, whether such meaning is inherent in words and grammar themselves or embedded in the context and practice of their use. Language socialization stresses the recurrence of linguistic behaviors across time, and thereby allies itself with practice theories of social transmission. This article examines how language socialization has been utilized in studies of home, school, community, and health practices within and across multilingual and multicultural contexts and concludes with a theoretical assessment of the approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
