Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T18:53:48.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Turn-taking, timing, and planning in early language acquisition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2015

MARISA CASILLAS ,
SUSAN C. BOBB  and
EVE V. CLARK
MARISA CASILLAS
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
SUSAN C. BOBB
Affiliation:
Gordon College
EVE V. CLARK
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Young children answer questions with longer delays than adults do, and they don't reach typical adult response times until several years later. We hypothesized that this prolonged pattern of delay in children's timing results from competing demands: to give an answer, children must understand a question while simultaneously planning and initiating their response. Even as children get older and more efficient in this process, the demands on them increase because their verbal responses become more complex. We analyzed conversational question–answer sequences between caregivers and their children from ages 1;8 to 3;5, finding that children (1) initiate simple answers more quickly than complex ones, (2) initiate simple answers quickly from an early age, and (3) initiate complex answers more quickly as they grow older. Our results suggest that children aim to respond quickly from the start, improving on earlier-acquired answer types while they begin to practice later-acquired, slower ones.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 6 , November 2016 , pp. 1310 - 1337
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation dissertation grant to MC, an ERC Advanced Grant to Stephen C. Levinson (269484-INTERACT), a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Göttingen to SCB, and by the Freiburg Centre for Advanced Study to EVC. We are grateful to Isaac Bleaman, Annette D'Onofrio, Anna Garbier, Edward King, and Anke Niessen for their careful phonetic measurements. We are also greatly indebted to Herbert H. Clark, Elma Hilbrink, and Stephen C. Levinson for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

REFERENCES

Balog, H. & Roberts, F. D. (2004). Perception of utterance relatedness during the first-word period. Journal of Child Language 31, 837–54.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1997). Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bates, D. M., Maechler, M. & Dai, B. (2009). lme4: linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. R package, version 0.999375–31. Online: <http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html>..>Google Scholar
Bateson, M. C. (1975). Mother–infant exchanges: the epigenesis of conversational interaction. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 263, 101–13.Google Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18, 355–87.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2012). Praat: doing phonetics by computer. Computer program, version 5.3·16. Online: <http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/>..>Google Scholar
Brown-Schmidt, S. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2008). Real-time investigation of referential domains in unscripted conversation: a targeted language-game approach. Cognitive Science 32, 643–84.Google Scholar
Camaioni, L., Longobardi, E., Venuti, P. & Bornstein, M. H. (1998). Maternal speech to 1-year-old children in two Italian cultural contexts. Early Development and Parenting 7, 9–17.Google Scholar
Casillas, M. (2014). Taking the floor on time: delay and deferral in children's turn-taking. In Arnon, I., Casillas, M., Kurumada, C. & Estigarribia, B. (eds), Language in interaction: studies in honor of Eve V. Clark, 101–14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Casillas, M. & Frank, M. C. (2013). The development of predictive processes in children's discourse understanding. In Knauff, M., Pauen, M., Sebanz, N. & Wachsmuth, I. (eds), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 299–304. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1978). From gesture to word: on the natural history of deixis in language acquisition. In Bruner, J. S. & Garton, A. (eds), Human growth and development: Wolfson College lectures 1976, 85–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (2009). First language acquisition, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (2015). Common ground. In MacWhinney, B. & O'Grady, W. (eds), The handbook of language emergence, 328–53. London: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Lindsey, K. L. (2015). Turn-taking: a case study of early gesture and word use in responses to WHERE and WHICH questions. Frontiers in Psychology 6, article no. 890. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00890.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V. & Sengul, C. J. (1978). Strategies in the acquisition of deixis. Journal of Child Language 5, 457–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Fox Tree, J. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84, 73–111.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1986). Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition 22, 1–39.Google Scholar
Cooper, W. E. & Danly, M. (1981). Segmental and temporal aspects of utterance-final lengthening. Phonetica 38, 106–15.Google Scholar
Dapretto, M. & Bjork, E. L. (2000). The development of word retrieval abilities in the second year and its relation to early vocabulary growth. Child Development 71, 635–48.Google Scholar
DeLong, K. A., Urbach, T. P. & Kutas, M. (2005). Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from brain activity. Nature Neuroscience 8, 1117–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J. & Alter, J. (2006). Word-minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English. Language and Speech 49, 137–73.Google Scholar
de Ruiter, J. P. (Ed.) (2012). Questions: formal, functional, and interactional perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
de Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H. & Enfield, N. (2006). Projecting the end of a speaker's turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–35.Google Scholar
Dunn, J. & Shatz, M. (1989). Becoming a conversationalist despite (or because of) having an older sibling. Child Development 60, 399–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1979). Children's verbal turn-taking. In Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (eds), Developmental pragmatics, 391–414. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Fernald, A., Perfors, A. & Marchman, V. A. (2006). Picking up speed in understanding: speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year. Developmental Psychology 42, 98–116.Google Scholar
Filipi, A. (2009). Toddler and parent interaction: the organisation of gaze, pointing and vocalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Fitneva, S. A. (2012). Beyond answers: questions and children's learning. In de Ruiter, J.-P. (ed.), Questions: formal, functional, and interactional perspectives, 165–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, C. E. & Thompson, S. A. (1996). Interactional units in conversation: syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 13, 134–84.Google Scholar
Forrester, M. (2013). Mutual adaptation in parent–child interaction. Interaction Studies 14, 190–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garvey, C. & Berninger, G. (1981). Timing and turn taking in children's conversations. Discourse Processes 4, 27–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gearhart, M. & Newman, D. (1977). Turn-taking in conversation: implications for developmental research. Quarterly Newsletter of the Institute for Comparative Human Development 1, 7–9.Google Scholar
Gries, S. T. (2005). Syntactic priming: a corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34, 365–99.Google Scholar
Griffin, Z. & Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological Science 11, 274–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hart, B. & Risley, T. R. (1992). American parenting of language-learning children: persisting differences in family–child interactions observed in natural home environments. Developmental Psychology 28, 1096–105.Google Scholar
Healey, P. G., Purver, M. & Howes, C. (2014). Divergence in dialogue. PloS one 9(6), e98598. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098598.Google Scholar
Heritage, J. & Clayman, S. (2011). Talk in action: interactions, identities, and institutions. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Hilbrink, E., Gattis, M. & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Early developmental changes in the timing of turn-taking: a longitudinal study of mother–infant interaction. Frontiers in Psychology 6, article no. 1492. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01492.Google Scholar
Jasnow, M. & Feldstein, S. (1986). Adult-like temporal characteristics of mother–infant vocal interactions. Child Development 57 754–61.Google Scholar
Kendrick, K. H. & Torreira, F. (2015). The timing and construction of preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Processes 52, 255–89.Google Scholar
Ko, E.-S. (2012). Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech. Lingua 122, 841–57.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (2001). Spoken word production: a theory of lexical access. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, 13464–71.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A. & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, 1–75.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2013). Action formation and ascription. In Stivers, T. & Sidnel, J. (Eds), The handbook of Conversation Analysis. (pp. 101–130). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. & Torreira, F. (2015). Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Frontiers in Psychology 6, article no. 731. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00731.Google Scholar
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106, 1126–77.Google Scholar
Lieberman, A. F. & Garvey, C. (1977). Interpersonal pauses in preschoolers’ verbal exchanges. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, LA.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: tools for analyzing talk, vol. 2: the database, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Magyari, L. & de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on anticipation of upcoming words. Frontiers in Psychology 3, article no. 376. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00376.Google Scholar
Ochs, E., Kremer-Sadlik, T., Sirota, K. G. & Solomon, O. (2004). Autism and the social world: an anthropological perspective. Discourse Studies 6, 147–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsen-Fulero., L. (1982). Style and stability in mother conversational behaviour: a study of individual differences. Journal of Child Language 9, 543–64.Google Scholar
Olsen-Fulero, L. & Conforti, J. (1983). Child responsiveness to mother questions of varying type and presentation. Journal of Child Language 10, 495–520.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2015). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Online <http://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
Reitter, D., Moore, J. D. & Keller, F. (2006). Priming of syntactic rules in task-oriented dialogue and spontaneous conversation. In Sun, Ron (ed.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 685–90. Vancouver: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Roy, B., Frank, M. C. & Roy, D. (2009). Exploring word learning in a high-density longitudinal corpus. In Taatgen, N. & van Rijn, H. (eds), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2106–11. Amsterdam: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation, vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction, vol. 1: a primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G. & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53, 361–82.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 8, 289–327.Google Scholar
Shatz, M. (1979). How to do things by asking: form–function pairings in mothers’ questions and their relation to children's responses. Child Development 50, 1093–9.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1977). Mothers’ speech research: from input to interaction. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds), Talking to children: language input and acquisition, 31–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., Hoymann, G., Rossano, F., de Ruiter, J.-P., Yoon, K.-E. & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 10587–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N. & Boves, L. (2005). On temporal aspects of turn taking in conversational dialogues. Speech Communication 47, 80–6.Google Scholar
Tice (Casillas), M. & Henetz, T. (2011). Turn-boundary projection: looking ahead. In Carlson, L., Hoelscher, C. & Shipley, T. F. (eds), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 838–43. Boston, MA: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. (1997). Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9, 81–105.Google Scholar
Weisleder, A. & Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters: early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological Science 24, 2143–52.Google Scholar
Wells, B. & Corrin, J. (2004). Prosodic resources, turn taking, and overlap in children's talk-in-interaction. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Ford, C. (eds), Sound patterns in interaction, 119–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Casillas supplementary material S1

Appendices

Download Casillas supplementary material S1(File)
File 91.7 KB