Communicative Functions of Preschoolers and their Mothers Across Cultures and Socioeconomic Status

The purpose of this study was to describe the cognitive-communicative functions demonstrated by typically developing preschoolers and their mothers during teaching and play interactions with a focus on differences in these communicative functions across racial/ethnic group, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender. The relationship between mothers' and preschoolers' communicative functions, as well as the relationship between mothers' and preschoolers' communicative functions and children's vocabulary, language, and social skills was examined. Data from the Familial and Social Environments of Young Children study, a supplement to the National Center for Early Development and Learning's (NCEDL) Multi-State Study of Pre-Kindergarten, were analyzed for this dissertation. Secondary analyses of race/ethnicity, SES, gender; and child outcomes variables of receptive and expressive language, vocabulary, and teacher ratings of the children's social skills were conducted using the NCEDL dataset. A coding system adapted from the work of Joan Tough (1982; 1984) and Ida Stockman (1996) was developed to calculate descriptive statistics for Means and Standard Deviations of frequencies of individual communicative functions per racial, SES, and gender group. Linear regression was utilized to analyze the relationship between communicative functions and children's language and social skills (N = 95), and whether the frequency and type of communicative functions differed by race/ethnicity, SES, and/or gender (N = 95). Pearson's correlations were conducted to identify any relationships between mothers' communicative functions and children's communicative functions. Results showed significant relationships between particular mother communicative functions and child communicative functions and outcomes. Few child communicative functions, however, predicted child outcomes. Rather, demographic factors such as SES, gender, and race/ethnicity, along with certain mother communicative functions, had a stronger link with the child outcomes. These results contribute to the literature on preschoolers' communicative function use, and the association among these communicative functions, academics, and social skills. Furthermore, the results provide data on how mothers' communicative function use might relate to their children's, and how culture and gender might play a role in a child's communicative function use. This information can be used to promote understanding of different pragmatic communication styles in preschoolers in order to improve assessment and intervention practices for all children

A tale of autobiographical memory development: New Zealand style

Autobiographical memories are for specific, personal past events that are of significance to an individual (Nelson, 1993). The social interaction model of autobiographical memory proposes that children begin learning about the relevance of personal memories through talking about the past with adults (Fivush, 1991). The current study investigated relations over time between maternal reminiscing style and children's own developing memory style, both with and independently of their mothers, from when the children were 19 months old. Relations between attachment quality and maternal and child conversational variables were also examined. Fifty-eight mother-child dyads discussed unique past events when the children were 19, 25, 32, and 40 months old. In addition, children participated in experimenter-child interviews about unique past events when they were 25, 32, and 40 months old. Children's language skills were measured at each timepoint. The mother child attachment relationship was measured at the 19-month timepoint. The present research demonstrated that the developmental progression to children's independent verbal memory actually begins with children's early interest in participating in the conversations and maternal reminiscing style, which together elicit children's later shared memory elaborations. Subsequently, children's shared memory elaborations and maternal reminiscing style both contribute to children's later independent memory at approximate I y 3-1/2 years of age. The present results isolated children's early interest in reminiscing as a crucial factor in initiating the social aspect of autobiographical memory. In contrast, to previous research, the current study did not find support for a simple socialisation path from mother to child (e.g. Reese et al., 1993), but rather demonstrated that bidirectional influences are present from the onset of mother-child conversations about the past. The current study also examined the contribution that attachment status may have to the development of joint reminiscing. Securely attached children demonstrated a greater willingness to participate in these conversations about the past and subsequently produced more unique memory information in comparison to insecurely attached children. In conjunction with the first set of results, these findings indicate that attachment security may be important in the foundation of mother-child joint reminiscing. Finally, contingency analyses showed that mothers from securely attached dyads provided more memory question elaborations in response to children's indications that they were willing to participate in these conversations, in contrast to mothers from insecurely attached dyads who provided more repetitions. The most appropriate response to these placeholders would be to continue to provide information to assist children in co-constructing the event with the mother, rather than continuing to provide information that the child has already received. Overall, mothers from securely attached dyads appear to be structuring past event talk with their children in a manner that may be labelled as "sensitive" for this task. In summary, the current study addressed the idea that autobiographical memory development is essentially a collaborative process with children significantly contributing to the development of their own reminiscing style from its inception. A secure attachment relationship may also enable the progress of the development of joint reminiscing

PREDICTING THE LANGUAGE ABILITIES OF CHILDREN

The ability to learn language is influenced both by children\u27s biological abilities and the environment in which they find themselves. Rather than low test scores alone, it may be that children who exhibit disproportionately low language abilities relative to what would be predicted from their biological abilities and expectations based on their environmental situations may be considered to exhibit a specific language impairment. The present study explores this hypothesis by taking measures aimed at estimating 45 children’s biological potential through direct measures o f parental abilities and environmental situations and examining the ability of these measures to predict children’s language abilities. Predictors were based on parental measures of nonword repetition, nonverbal intelligence, working memory, sentence recall, grammaticality judgment, reading, and family environment. The findings of this study show a myriad of variables affect language development from both biological and environmental factors, implying that learning language involves the interplay between children’s innate makeup and their environmental conditions

Pragmatic language in autism and fragile X syndrome: links with physiological arousal and anxiety

This dissertation is comprised of three manuscripts focused on delineating pragmatic language profiles in children with autism and fragile X syndrome, and on understanding the potential impact of physiological dysregulation on these profiles. The first manuscript presents a review of the existing literature on physiological arousal in autism and fragile X syndrome, with a focus on the relationship between arousal modulation and social competence. The second two manuscripts present original research: the first consists of a cross-population comparison of pragmatic language in autism and fragile X syndrome; the second extends upon this line of research by examining cardiac arousal as a mechanism that may play a role of social-communicative impairment in these disorders. These three manuscripts address the extent to which pragmatic language deficits overlap in autism and fragile X syndrome, and whether such deficits are linked with dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. This work has implications for developing syndrome-specific interventions and ultimately may inform biological pathways that may be common to autism and fragile X syndrome.Doctor of Philosoph

Environmental influences on communication development: Implications for children with neurodevelopmental communication impairments

At the intersection of clinical neuroscience and communication sciences and disorders, this dissertation provides a compilation of studies aimed at examining contextual influences on children's communication development and the implications of this work for children with neurodevelopmental communication impairments. As discussed in Chapter 1, the present work is grounded in dynamic systems theory of development and a distributed model of communication, which together emphasize development as a context-dependent dynamic multilevel system that unfolds over time and is shaped by a multitude of factors. Neurodevelopmental communication impairments such as speech sound disorder, language disorder, and autism spectrum disorder affect approximately 1.5 - 16% of children, and are associated with academic, socioemotional, and behavioral difficulties. The work in Chapter 2 directly examines a common form of environmental support for children with neurodevelopmental communication impairments, speech-language therapy. More specifically, it assesses the effectiveness of a multimodal, integrated speech-language intervention in facilitating multisyllabic productions in six children 2-4 years of age with various neurodevelopmental disabilities. It uses single-case and within-subject experimental designs to understand individual trajectories and shape clinical practice. As a complement to the behavioral intervention, Chapter 3 of this thesis explores the novel use of noninvasive biosensors to measure electrical conductance across the skin during speech-language and occupational therapy as a potential support for communication in eight children, ages 2-11, with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Skin conductance is mediated by sympathetic cholinergic sudomotor nerve fibers and has been used extensively in the study of psychological states and processes. However, traditionally its use has been limited to highly controlled laboratory settings, whereas the use of such technology within the context of daily activities remains a major challenge. Next, as a means to examine a broader range of environmental influences, Chapter 4 uses a longitudinal monozygotic (MZ) twin difference method, a genetically sensitive design, to examine four candidate nonshared environmental influences on children's language development: birthweight, breastfeeding, and home reading exposure and parenting (M age = 7). This study aims to identify nonshared environmental effects on later language development, at mean ages 10 (n = 115 pairs) and 12 years (n = 108 pairs), across two assessment contexts: standardized testing and narrative language sampling. Finally, Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation by highlighting the need to study a broader range of contextual factors influencing communication development and its associated mechanisms, incorporate diverse and complementary methodologies, and develop effective communication supports for children with neurodevelopmental communication impairments

Power plays : the representation of mother-daughter disputes in contemporary plays by women ; a study in discourse analysis

This thesis investigates women\u27;s discursive practices in constructing and negotiating mother-daughter disputes and underlying power relationships. It is based on a corpus of contemporary plays by women, conflict talk being an essential feature of drama. The study pursues various strands of analysis. It attends to the turn-by-turn details of conflict talk as situated local interaction, it looks at aspects of the (para)linguistic choices speakers make in designing and delivering their utterances, and it considers the role of wider contextual aspects such as the participants\u27; gender, social identities and relationship for the production and interpretation of talk. In doing so, the study draws on a range of methodological frameworks that fall under the umbrella of interactional sociolinguistics, drawing, inter alia, on the analytical tools of conversation analysis, Gumperz\u27; concept of contextualisation and the notion of face (work) and politeness (Goffman, Brown & Levinson). The study explores how the sequential organisation of mother-daughter disputes contributes to the contextualisation of this speech activity. In particular, it examines the procedures which highlight the adversative character of oppositional moves in mother-daughter arguments. It also looks at the types of argumentative actions that occur in these disputes and at the ways in which these actions and their responses are formatted and sequenced to uncover the dynamics of the delicate power play that can take place between mothers and daughters in conflict talk. The results of this study call into question the still-prevalent notion of women as generally displaying an orientation towards cooperative, face-saving interaction and consent. They show that in examining women\u27;s talk-in-interaction it is vital to adopt a context-sensitive approach, which takes into account such features as the situational context and interpersonal relationship aspects. This research has implications for the study of naturally-occurring conflict talk, for although it looks at constructed dialogue, it yields insight into underlying patterns of knowledge about the workings of real disputes. It also contributes to a number of other research fields, including work on family interaction, intergenerational communication, female discourse, stylistics and power in talk-in-interaction.Die vorliegenden Arbeit ist im Bereich der empirischen Diskursforschung angesiedelt und untersucht die Gesprächspraktiken, mit denen Mutter-Tochter-Streitgespräche und zu Grunde liegende Machtbeziehungen von den Beteiligten in der lokalen Interaktion (re-)konstituiert und ausgehandelt werden. Die Untersuchung basiert auf einem Korpus zeitgenössischer Theaterstücke von Frauen. Dramen bieten eine reiche Datenquelle für die Konfliktforschung, da die Mechanismen, die Alltagsgesprächen zu Grunde liegen, die Grundlage für die Gestaltung von Dramendialogen bilden. Die Studie behandelt eine Reihe von Fragen nach der Entstehung, Durchführung und Beendigung von Streitgesprächen sowie nach dem Zusammenhang zwischen Konflikt und Macht in (fiktionaler) Mutter-Tochter-Interaktion. Die Arbeit verfolgt einen interaktionalsoziolinguistischen Ansatz der Diskursanalyse und integriert zwei Kontextaspekte in die Analyse verbaler Interaktion zwischen Müttern und Töchtern: den lokalen, sequenziellen Kontext von Äußerungen und den globalen soziokulturellen Kontext. Methodisch greift sie vor allem auf die Untersuchungsmethoden und -ergebnisse der ethnomethodologischen Konversationsanalyse zurück. Die Studie beinhaltet demnach eine Mikroanalyse von Gesprächen und untersucht die sequenzielle Abfolge von Redebeiträgen (Organisation des Sprecherwechsels, Präferenzorganisation und Verknüpfungstechniken), deren formale Eigenschaften (syntaktische Struktur, Lexis) sowie prosodische, paralinguistische und nonverbale Äußerungsaspekte. Die Verbindung von Detailanalysen mit ethnographischen und soziokulturellen Informationen ermöglicht es zu untersuchen, wie Konfliktgespräche von den Beteiligten gemeinsam interaktiv hergestellt werden, wie der Aktivitätstyp Streit kontextualisiert wird, und wie Teilnehmerinnen ihre sozialen Identitäten und (Macht-)Beziehungen im Verlauf von verbalen Auseinandersetzungen (re-)konstruieren und aushandeln. Die Ergebnisse der Studie machen deutlich, dass es für die Untersuchung von Frauengesprächen notwendig ist, Generalisierungen über weibliches Gesprächsverhalten zu vermeiden und stattdessen einen kontext-sensitiven Ansatz zu verfolgen, der sowohl den situativen Kontext als auch verschiedene Aspekte der interpersonellen Beziehungen zwischen den Sprecherinnen mit einbezieht. Die vorliegende Arbeit leistet somit einen Beitrag zu einer Reihe von Forschungsfeldern, so z.B. der linguistischen Konfliktforschung, der Forschung zu Familieninteraktion und intergenerationeller Kommunikation, der Forschung zu weiblichem Kommunikationsverhalten, der Erforschung von Macht in (sprachlicher) Interaktion und nicht zuletzt der Stilistik

Ongoing Themes in Psychology and Culture

Selected Papers from the Sixteenth International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2002, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. (c) 2004, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychologyhttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_proceedings/1007/thumbnail.jp

A Study of Accomodation of Prosodic and Temporal Features in Spoken Dialogues in View of Speech Technology Applications

Inter-speaker accommodation is a well-known property of human speech and human interaction in general. Broadly it refers to the behavioural patterns of two (or more) interactants and the effect of the (verbal and non-verbal) behaviour of each to that of the other(s). Implementation of thisbehavior in spoken dialogue systems is desirable as an improvement on the naturalness of humanmachine interaction. However, traditional qualitative descriptions of accommodation phenomena do not provide sufficient information for such an implementation. Therefore, a quantitativedescription of inter-speaker accommodation is required. This thesis proposes a methodology of monitoring accommodation during a human or humancomputer dialogue, which utilizes a moving average filter over sequential frames for each speaker. These frames are time-aligned across the speakers, hence the name Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA). Analysis of spontaneous human dialogue recordings by means of the TAMA methodology reveals ubiquitous accommodation of prosodic features (pitch, intensity and speech rate) across interlocutors, and allows for statistical (time series) modeling of the behaviour, in a way which is meaningful for implementation in spoken dialogue system (SDS) environments.In addition, a novel dialogue representation is proposed that provides an additional point of view to that of TAMA in monitoring accommodation of temporal features (inter-speaker pause length and overlap frequency). This representation is a percentage turn distribution of individual speakercontributions in a dialogue frame which circumvents strict attribution of speaker-turns, by considering both interlocutors as synchronously active. Both TAMA and turn distribution metrics indicate that correlation of average pause length and overlap frequency between speakers can be attributed to accommodation (a debated issue), and point to possible improvements in SDS “turntaking” behaviour. Although the findings of the prosodic and temporal analyses can directly inform SDS implementations, further work is required in order to describe inter-speaker accommodation sufficiently, as well as to develop an adequate testing platform for evaluating the magnitude ofperceived improvement in human-machine interaction. Therefore, this thesis constitutes a first step towards a convincingly useful implementation of accommodation in spoken dialogue systems

A sociocultural approach to memory development: private speech and culture as determinants of early remembering

The main purpose of the studies reported in this thesis was to investigate young children’s memory development within a Vygotskian (1934/1986) theoretical framework in an attempt to understand the mechanisms via which socio-cultural factors impact on children's remembering. The central hypothesis of the studies undertaken for this thesis was that children's use of language to regulate their own behaviour involved the mechanism via which individual differences in social and cultural background impact on children's memory development. In particular, children's use of private speech as a means of using language strategically to regulate their behaviour was examined in its relations to their remembering performance on the assumption that effects of social and cultural factors on memory development will be reflected through the extent to which children in both the British and the Saudi societies tended to use this verbal behaviour. The phenomenon of private speech represents the developmental and functional relationship between social processes and the child's mental functioning in the sense that this verbal behaviour is assumed to underlie the developmental course of the child's intemalisation of social processes. Therefore, establishing links between private speech and children's memory development signifies the notion concerning the inseparability of the individual and the act of remembering from their social and cultural contexts (Mistry, 1997).Chapter 1 is dedicated to discuss the development of working memory processes and their determinants aiming to highlight the fact that several authors have argued for the importance of investigating effects of children's social and cultural contexts on their remembering behaviour in order to identify those mechanisms that are assumed to underlie developmental changes in children's memory performance. Chapter 2 reviews theories on the cultural processes influencing memory, and previous research on cross-cultural differences in memory development. Chapter 2 also outlines the theoretical framework of the studies reported in this thesis. Study 1 reported in Chapter 3 examined the incidence and function of private speech as well as its developmental and social aspects within and between the two cultural groups of children: the British and the Saudi Arabian. The findings indicated that private speech is a universal stage in children's cognitive development and its developmental and functional aspects are considered to be a function of cultural variations in children's socialisation between the two cultures. Study 2 reported in Chapter 4 was designed to address the possibility that private speech as a self-regulatory verbal behaviour may explain children's individual differences within and across the two cultures in terms of use of the subvocal rehearsal within the model of working memory. This issue was examined by linking private speech to the phenomenon of phonological similarity effect that is assumed to signify children's tendency to employ the subvocal rehearsal (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993). The findings showed that in both cultures, children who relied more on private speech to regulate their behaviour were more susceptible to the phonological similarity effect and their overall remembering performance was better than children who were less dependent on private speech. These results suggest that the regulating capacity inherent in private speech enhances strategic remembering in verbal working memory. The relationship between private speech and remembering was further examined in Study 3 reported in Chapter 5. Study 3 aimed to investigate how children's individual differences within and across the two cultures in terms of using private speech would relate to their autobiographical narratives. Based on the dominant cultural norms, early socialisation of autobiographical memory involves teaching children the appropriate cultural way of reporting past personal memories in an organised narrative style when participating in memory talks with others, particularly parents. In this regard, children use language to achieve two main goals, the first is to share memories with others and the second is to use language internally in order to develop a self-reminding capacity (Nelson, 1993c; Nelson & Fivush, 2000). By representing the genetic link between social processes and mental processes, private speech may underlie the developmental shift from using language externally as in parent-child memory conversations towards applying it internally in order to enhance the development of self-reminding talk. Therefore, within Study 3, it was hypothesised that children's use of self-regulatory private speech might be the mechanism via which social interactions and cultural practices affect children's autobiographical memory. The findings of Study 3 provided support for a strategic use of language via private speech in the development of children's personal memories. In both cultures, children who were dependent more on private speech were better able in reporting more autobiographical narrative in a more organised way than children who relied less on this verbal behaviour. There was also a cultural effect on children's personal memories in the sense that the British than the Saudi children have reported more autobiographical memories in a more detailed way. The final chapter summarises the main findings of the three studies and indicates issues arising from these findings

Developmental aspects of communication in children with Down's syndrome

This thesis presents a series of investigations into communicative interaction between mothers and their preschool children with Down's Syndrome (DS), and mothers and their infants with DS. Reference to the literature in this area indicates that there is a need to determine not only how the DS child and/or her/his mother differ from their nonhandicapped peers but also ways in which DS children's language can be accelerated. Insofar as the preschool child with DS is concerned, a series of four studies are presented. The first of these investigates the effect of the label "DS" upon the mothers' perceptions of children thus labelled. Using videotapes of nonhandicapped, above average infants, it is demonstrated that some of the mothers' ratings of children are negatively affected if the child is described as having "DS". This is found to occur to a significant degree in both mothers of DS children and mothers of nonhandicapped children, although the effect is not identical in both groups across all the ratings measured. To investigate whether any such negative distortions, or "labelling effects" would affect the interactive behaviour of mothers of ES children, a sample of mothers of DS children was videotaped, with each mother in turn playing separately with 2 sisters. These girls were four years old, nonhandicapped, non-identical twins. For the purposes of this experiment, one of the twins (the more developmentally advanced and the physically larger of the 2) was always described to the mothers as having DS, her sister always being described as nonhandicapped (i.e. the child least like a DS child - if either could possibly be thought of in that way - was described as having-DS). It was found that all but one mother believed the experimental manipulation of the label; videotape analyses revealed furthermore that mothers treated the sisters significantly differently. Specifically the supposed DS child was ignored more often than her sister with mothers not responding to her attempts to initiate interaction and thus giving her less opportunity to control or direct the interactions. Mothers also used different types of interrogatives with her, avoiding the use of those questions which required more complex answers (wh- type questions) and using overall far more questions requiring only a simple yes/no response. Moreover, audio-recorded interviews with the subjects in this experiment revealed them to be explaining and describing the supposed DS child's behaviour in a very negative way, interpreting her behaviour and speech on the basis of her diagnostic label, giving her little or no credit for any achievements. These results are discussed with reference to the literature on mother and DS child interaction, expectancy effects, and with reference to social psychological studies of stereotyping. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.