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

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Lois Holzman <
lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org> wrote:

> This formulation of the question is clarifying, Mike, and helps me realize
> that I can't answer it—
> because it is asking something in terms that frame the thing that's going
> on in a particular way that, to me, is too assumptive.
> I don't see it in terms of external constraints, intentions and goals - I
> don't have a mentalistic understanding of the social relational activity of
> speaking, creating conversation, playing with language.
> I can't see what is gained by invoking compliance, imposition, limitations,
> intentions and goals, and I feel that doing so obscures the "form of
> life"-ness. I'm with Wittgenstein on this - speaking is part of an activity,
> or of a form of life."
> An experimenter asking a child to "say what I say" is a particular language
> game, and the same child talking/babbling in another situation is another.
> If I understand, you're trying to find a reason that what the child says is
> different in the two. I guess I wonder why you think they wouldn't be. And
> why the direction to look is "internal."
> 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 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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