[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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



If a man in a white coat says "Do XYZ", what stimuli does the child have to guide them in how to do it? Maybe if they just did it a few seconds ago, its still ringing in their ears. But otherwise, this is demanding a really self-conscious mastery of their own action.

But if a speech act is generated spontaneously from conditions arising from the environment (still there) and the disposition of their own body (still there), then regeneration of the speech is a recapitulation of the whole act in its context, isn't it? with all the necessary stimuli in place.

It's like when I forget what I was going to say, I'll ask Vonney to tell me what were talking about just before, and then I can pick up the thread of my thoughts. Kids need the thread as well.

Sorry for the red herring about inner speech. I think I'd have to hear what other explanations are on offer to get where you're coming from Mike.

a

Mike Cole wrote:
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
        _______________________________________________
        xmca mailing list
        xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
        http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca


-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media) http://www.erythrospress.com/
    Orders: http://www.erythrospress.com/store/main.html#books


    _______________________________________________
    xmca mailing list
    xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
    http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca



--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media) http://www.erythrospress.com/
Orders: http://www.erythrospress.com/store/main.html#books

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca