Lois Lois Holzman, Director East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy 920 Broadway, 14th floor New York NY 10010 tel. 212.941.8906 ext. 324 fax 212.941.0511 lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org www.eastsideinstitute.org www.performingtheworld.org loisholzman.org On Jul 20, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Mike Cole wrote:
Andy/David/ Lois:Why are the simplifications when children imitate sentences that carry outthe intentions of others and limit their agency tocomplying with external constraints imposed by others absent when they carry out their own intentions in speech acts that are instrumental to carryingout those goals and may be more complicated, grammatically, than whatexperimenters ask of them? I get the dropping out the subject part in innerspeech, I think. mikeOn 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 theentire 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 notgenerally such a project.I don't really know if that's relevant to the distinction you're afterMike. 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 studiesof elicited imitation where an adult says somesentence and asks a little kid to repeat it. Kids simplify the sentence innormal 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 struckme, I could not find it in the recent liton 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, youcan have your coffee." they can repeat this sentence pretty much as it isright 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 termsalone -- without its original intentional andcontextual support." In the absence of such support, the task can strainthe 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 languageacquisition in school settings and to my reccurrentquestions about the social situation of development. Is it relevant to thediscussion of egocentric and social speech, David? mike _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list 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_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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