Andy/David/ Lois:
Why are the simplifications when children imitate sentences that carry
out the intentions of others and limit their agency to
complying with external constraints imposed by others absent when they
carry out their own intentions in speech acts that are instrumental to
carrying out those goals and may be more complicated, grammatically,
than what experimenters ask of them? I get the dropping out the subject
part in inner speech, I think.
mike
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 10:30 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Mike, my reading of Vygotsky's explanation of the process of speech
being abbreviated as it transforms into silent speech, as I recall,
is that the child for example leaves off the subject of a sentence
for example, because they already know the subject, and such like.
I.e., as I read it, they carry dense elements of context internally
so that the verbal instruction to themselves carries that context
implicitly. Just like if I say "Pass me that" the hearer won't
understand without the help of a shared visual field.
So intention is part of the context, but it is the context, and it's
various mental representations and cues which is relevant, isn't it?
So for example, the continued presence of all the elements of a
snippet of dialogue act as cues which would allow something to be
repeated, because the entire act in response to cues in the context
can be repeated.
But also, relevant to a topic we have been discussing, Mike, the
project of which the speech act is a part has to be understood and
shared by the child if they are to make sense of it, and of course
psychological testing is not generally such a project.
I don't really know if that's relevant to the distinction you're
after Mike.
Andy
Mike Cole wrote:
David's note of a few days ago on 3-7 year old changes in
egocentric speech
reminded
me of an old article by Slobin and Welch (reprinted in Ferguson
and Slobin,
*Studies of Child Development, 1963)
*that it took a while to track down. The study is often cited in
studies of
elicited imitation where an adult says some
sentence and asks a little kid to repeat it. Kids simplify the
sentence in
normal circumstances ("Where is the kitty"
becomes "where kitty") and other such stuff. There is a pretty large
literature on this.
But when I went to find the phenomenon in the article that had
most struck
me, I could not find it in the recent lit
on elicited imitation. The phenomenon seems relevant to the
monologic,
dialogic etc speech discussion.
The phenomenon is this: When a 2yr/5month old child is recorded
saying "If
you finish your eggs all up, Daddy, you
can have your coffee." they can repeat this sentence pretty much
as it is
right afterward. But 10 minutes later it has
become simplified a la the usual observation.
Citing William James (the child has an "intention to say so and
so") Slobin
and Welch remark:
If that linguistic form is presented for imitation while the
intention is
still operative, it can be faily successfully imitated. Once the
intention
is gone, however, the utterance must be processed in linguistic
terms alone
-- without its original intentional and
contextual support." In the absence of such support, the task
can strain
the child's abilities and reveal a more limited competence than
may actually
be present in spontaneous speech (p. 489-90).
This kind of observation seems relevant in various ways both to
language
acquisition in school settings and to my reccurrent
questions about the social situation of development. Is it
relevant to the
discussion of egocentric and social speech, David?
mike
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