Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech complexity ; From 2-?

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

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> 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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> --
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