Amy, Wendy, and Beth: Learning Language in South Baltimore 9780292759145

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Amy, Wendy, and Beth

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Amy, Wendy, and Beth

Learning Language in South Baltimore by Peggy J. Miller

4 y ^ University of Texas Press, Austin

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Copyright © 1979 by Peggy J. Miller Copyright © 1982 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1982 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78712. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Miller, Peggy J. (Peggy Jo), 1950Amy, Wendy, and Beth: learning language in South Baltimore. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Language acquisition. 2. Speech and social status—Maryland—Baltimore. I. Title. P118.M54 401'.9 81-11656 ISBN 0-292-70357-0 AACR2 ISBN 978-0-292-75914-5 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-75915-2 (individual e-book)

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To my parents

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 3

xi

1. Background 7 Studies of Social Class and Language Development 7 Studies of Child Language 27 Studying Language Development in South Baltimore: Toward a Fairer Assessment of Knowledge 30 2. Procedures 33 Research Site: South Baltimore 33 Subjects: Search and Selection 35 Design and Methods 37 Description 40 3. The Children and Their Families Amy 51 Wendy 59 Beth 66

51

4. Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking 73 Naming People and Things 77 Speaking Appropriately 99 Speaking Appropriately to Dolls 105 Rhyming, Singing, and Playing Verbal Games 114 Using Correct Grammar, Pronunciation, and Intonation 118 Counting, Reciting the Alphabet, Identifying Colors 119 Other 120 Other Studies of Direct Instruction 120 Learning from Direct Instruction 124 Other Issues Related to Direct Instruction 129

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viii Contents 5. Combining Words to Express Meanings 132 Adequacy of the Categories 137 Sequence of Development of Semantic/Syntactic Relations 138 6. Summaries, Conclusions, Questions 150 The Children and Their Families 150 Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking 151 Combining Words to Express Meanings 154 Inter-relating Descriptions 155 Previous Studies of the Verbal Abilities of White Children from the Lower Classes 156 Research Strategy 159 Appendices 165 A. Consent Form 165 B. Recording Equipment for Observation Sessions 166 C. Toys for Observation Sessions 166 D. Transcription Procedures 166 E. Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Relations: Definitions and Examples 174 References 183 Name Index 193 Subject Index 195

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Figures and Tables

Figures 1. Amy's Rate of Correct Naming in Relation to Form of Mothers Requests 92 2. Proportion of Multi-Word Relations Accounted For by Functional Relations and Verb Relations 139 Tables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Amy's Schedule 39 Wendy's Schedule 40 Beth's Schedule 41 General Description of Speech Samples 44 Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Relations 48 Inter-Coder Reliabilities of Semantic/Syntactic Categories 49 7. Frequency of Interactions Involving Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking 78-79 8. Frequency of Naming Units by Participant 81 9. Frequency of Naming Units According to Content 81 10. Frequency of Naming Units According to Roles of Speakers 86 11. Naming Units Involving Mothers: Distribution According to Roles of Speakers 88 12. Form of Amy's Mother's Requests for Names: Absolute and Proportional Frequencies in Each Category 90 13. Amy's Responses to Mother's Requests for Names: Absolute and Proportional Frequencies in Each Category 91 14. Absolute and Proportional Frequencies of Different Semantic/Syntactic Relations 134-136

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Acknowledgments

I thank Amy, Wendy, and Beth and their families for welcoming me into their homes time after time, for generously sharing their experiences, and for teaching me about language learning in South Baltimore. The friendships that evolved during the course of the study continue to enrich my life. I a m grateful to the many people who contributed to the data collection phase of the study. Roberta McConochie got me started. The video wizards at Johnson Brothers knew what wasn't working and how to fix it. Terry Edler assisted at many of the taping sessions. One of the pleasures of the project was my sister Kathy s involvement. She assisted at the later taping sessions, developed friendships with the families, transcribed tapes and interviews, and provided, throughout, emotional support and intellectual companionship. Transcribing the tapes was an arduous task involving the efforts of many people. I a m particularly grateful to Amy's Aunt Karen and Uncle Bruce, Wendy's mother Liz, and Beth's mother Nora, who skillfully deciphered child speech. I benefited from the help of various people at Teachers College, Columbia University. I a m especially indebted to Lois Bloom, who taught me how to do research on child language and believed I could do it on my own. She lent her support throughout the project and offered incisive criticisms of draft after draft. I thank Clifford Hill for his continual encouragement. To my fellow students, the women who now or in the recent past worked in 1055 Thorndike, I express my appreciation. They sustained me intellectually and emotionally. A special thanks to Ira Blake, Lois Hood, Karin Lifter, Lorraine Rocissano, and Bambi Schieffelin. Several people have read and commented on parts of the manuscript. I a m grateful to Judith DeJong, Hans Furth, Catherine Garvey, Perry Gilmore, Anca Nemoianu, Lorraine Rocissano, Bambi Schieffelin, and Janet Theophano. During the years of this project my life and work were enriched by several special friendships. I thank Peggy Crull, whose caring took many forms. Again and again she raised my spirits and helped

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xii Acknowledgments me think more clearly about psychological and social issues. I benefited from Bettie Reutter s rare gift for empathy. Ruth Wylie gave me a quiet place to work and a model of academic rigor. Mary Jo Kirschman guided me through welfare offices and other formidable institutions. Art Levine provided vitamins, humor, and Elvis Costello. I am grateful to Cathleen Bahan for her exuberant imagination, to Anne Healey for her letters, and to Barbara Blalock for exhilarating conversations. I thank Charmian Elkes for gentle lucidity; Emil for a love of words. Mark Reutter was a sustaining presence in my life long before this project began. Were it not for his caring then and now, there would be no book. He thought through the issues with me. He helped by his listening, his curiosity, his unfailing confidence in me, his insightful readings of countless drafts. I thank him for his commitment to writing and to social change. For financial assistance, I acknowledge the National Institute of Mental Health for a Predoctoral Research Service Award and the National Science Foundation for a Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant. The writing of this book was completed at the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development, Catholic University I thank my colleagues and students for their encouragement and for stimulating discussions concerning cognitive, social, and linguistic development. I am grateful to Judith DeJong for her help in preparing the manuscript and to Dorothy Kane for her accurate typing. Finally, I thank Scott Lubeck, my editor, for his warm and consistent support. P.M.

November 1980

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Amy, Wendy, and Beth

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Introduction

One of the most telling facts about the history of South Baltimore is that the local historians have had nothing to say about it. South Baltimore, a home of working people for over one hundred years, bears the marks of "this strange quality of invisibleness" (Nutter 1970). Scholars have been just as silent about the early language development of children from communities like South Baltimore. The purpose of this book is to say something about how three children, living and growing in South Baltimore, began to learn language. Amy, Wendy, and Beth were about two years old when I began to visit them in 1975-1976. For eight months I came every week or so to listen and observe. During this time they lost their baby plumpness. Their hair grew thick enough for barrettes and rubber bands. They learned to ride big-wheel bikes and to put words together to form sentences. Taken by the hand, they walked and chattered up to Light Street. In play they ventured out again, "baby" in tow. Each gave expression more and more articulately to a distinct personality. Each entered more and more fully into conversation. Each created a more and more complex imaginative world. In studying three children I make no claims to a sample that is "representative" in the technical sense. Amy, Wendy, and Beth were not chosen by reference to a printout of all live births and a random numbers table. They were selected from among the children whom I happened to meet on the streets and in homes and health clinics in South Baltimore. I do claim to know something about Amy, Wendy, and Beth, to offer in-depth descriptions of several aspects of their language development. These descriptions are based on prolonged contact with the families, systematic observation of the children in their own homes, careful listening as the mothers expressed their thoughts and feelings. While the sample of children is small, the sample of behavior is not. Thousands of utterances per child, thousands of nonverbal behaviors were recorded and painstakingly transcribed. For some descriptions I treat these behaviors in simple quantitative ways, displaying them as tabled frequencies and proportions, Other descriptions are entirely qualitative.

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4

Introduction

Undertaken originally as a Ph.D. dissertation, the study exists within an academic tradition. As an investigation of early language development, it addresses scholars in the fields of child language and sociolinguistics, contributing findings about a population of children that has not been studied before. The book was written for two other audiences as well. As a description of Amy, Wendy, and Beth, it takes as its audience the children and their families. They admitted me into their lives; I was accountable to them to create an accurate and caring description, one that was comprehensible to them. Amy, Wendy, and Beth were two years old at the time of the study. Already their families were thinking ahead to the time when the children would go to elementary school. As an account of language learning at home during the preschool years, the book addresses teachers, social workers, and others whose job it is to teach and to otherwise serve the needs of children from workingclass backgrounds. How to speak intelligibly to three such different audiences? The reader will find that sometimes one or the other comes to the fore. In writing portraits of the children and their families, I was especially mindful of the families themselves. The many references to other studies, the highly technical analyses are primarily for scholars. In Chapter 6 I speak more directly to teachers, raising questions about the implications of the findings for the formal education of working-class children. Throughout I have tried to keep the jargon to a m i n i m u m , to write in a way that includes, rather than excludes. Still, there will be times when the reader's patience will be tried, when he or she will have to "read between the lines/' as Beth's mother put it. The organization of the book parallels the process of discovery. Chapter 1 begins, as I did several years ago, by surveying two research traditions. The first concerns the relationship between social class and language development. The second is the research on child language that came of age in the 1960s. Neither of these traditions has produced a description of the early language development of white, working-class children. The present study is a first attempt to remedy this situation. It represents an intersection of these two traditions, taking its problem from the first, theory and methods from the second. The chapter ends with a proposal for new lines of inquiry into the communicative abilities of children from different social and ethnic backgrounds. Readers who are not interested in a detailed review of studies may want to turn to "Conclusions" on page 25 and "Studying Language Development in South Baltimore: Toward a Fairer Assessment of Knowledge" on page 30.

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Introduction 5 Chapter 2 provides a first glimpse of South Baltimore. I recall how I met Amy, Wendy, and Beth, and how they were chosen from among other possible subjects. The design and methods of the study are reviewed—the preliminary, get-acquainted phase followed by the data collection, the video recording methods, the interviews. Different kinds of description are discussed and procedures are outlined. Included here is an account of transcription as collaboration between the families and myself. I describe how we worked together to construct a written record of child speech. In Chapter 3 we enter the worlds of Amy, Wendy, and Beth. Each child is described—her personality, her daily occupations, her playmates, the place where she lived, and the people who lived with her. I wanted to know who challenged Amy to a fight, where Beth went on her imaginary excursions, which doll Wendy favored at the moment and who would be favored tomorrow. Of equal importance were the mothers. What did they do every day, and how did they feel about it? What did they value in a friend, a child? What were their beliefs about childrearing, their views on language development? These portraits or qualitative descriptions provide the ethnographic framework of the study. They are within the tradition of "presentational ethnography," as defined by Hymes (1978). The intent is to point out the impish grin, evoke the wistfulness in a voice, dramatize the mutual involvement of a mother and child at play so that the reader catches a glimpse, now and then, of living people and comes a little closer to apprehending their meanings. What the mothers said about language learning led to the issue of direct instruction in language and speaking. Described in Chapter 4 are several kinds of interactions in which the mothers or other speakers explicitly told the child what to say, or how to say it, or quizzed her on these matters. I want to emphasize that direct instruction was not on my mind when I embarked on the study. Indeed, there was little in the literature at the time to indicate that teaching contributes anything to language learning during the early years of life. Nevertheless, it turned out that Amy, Wendy, and Beth were taught to name and to be polite and assertive. They practiced talking to "babies" and rehearsed rhymes and songs. In discussing these interactions I try to show that direct instruction is an effective way of transmitting certain kinds of knowledge about language and the social world. Chapter 4, a large and sprawling one, begins with the mothers' belief that teaching contributes importantly to language learning and moves quickly into an analysis, based on the video transcripts, of naturally occurring teaching interactions. Seven categories of

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6

Introduction

direct instruction are identified. Of these, "naming people and things" occurred most frequently and is described in detail, with summaries on pages 87 and 94. The discussion of naming sequences concludes with hypotheses about what the children learned from this particular category of direct instruction. We then move on to "speaking appropriately," then to "speaking appropriately to dolls," and so on. Having considered each of the categories in turn, I ask the larger question of what the children learned from direct instruction in general. Taken up next are the issues of individual differences in the frequency of direct instruction and of the effects of the observation procedures themselves on this kind of interaction. During the time that I visited'Amy, Wendy, and Beth they learned to put words together. They said, "That cat," "Put baby truck," "I fix it," and, eventually, "Now drink your ice tea, OK?" Learning to combine words to express meanings is one of the major tasks of early language development—one which has inspired a n u m b e r of recent studies and speculation about a universal set of early compositional meanings. In Chapter 5 I undertake a highly technical analysis of the kinds of meanings that the children expressed in their early sentences and of how these meanings developed over time. This issue is important in a different way from the issue of direct instruction (which is important because it came from the mothers themselves). With compositional meanings we have an issue that originated in the formal study of early language development. Procedures have been developed for investigating this question, and findings are available concerning various populations of children. This makes it possible to draw reasonable comparisons, applying a widely-used "measure." When these comparisons were made, it turned out that Amy, Wendy, and Beth resembled children from other backgrounds in a variety of important ways. The final chapter (6) opens with summaries of each of the descriptions—the portraits of the children and their families, the analysis of direct instruction, and the analysis of compositional meanings. Considered next is the question of how these descriptions relate to one another. I then discuss the findings in relation to past studies of children from the lower classes and raise questions about educational implications. The chapter ends with a discussion of the research strategy, including personal dimensions, ethical issues, and collaborative models of research. Throughout the book the children and their families are referred to by pseudonyms. The n a m e of the community has not been fictionalized.

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1 Background

In order to learn about language development in South Baltimore, I developed a mode of inquiry, a way of studying the problem. I made repeated observations of the children in their homes, paid attention to differences as well as similarities among the children, solicited the families' insights into language learning, and made comparisons with other groups of children from various social and cultural backgrounds. The rationale for this mode of inquiry emerged out of a critical reading of past research. Studies of Social Class and Language Development The typical study within this tradition compared large groups of children from different social classes. Studies of phonology or articulation are not considered here but were reviewed by McCarthy (1954) and Cazden (1966). Although I focus on white children from the less privileged classes, many of the issues apply also to children from other poor and minority groups. See Baratz (1973) for a review of the literature on the language abilities of black children. EARLY STUDIES

The first systematic studies of the relationship between social class and language development were conducted in the 1930 s and 1940 s (e.g., Davis 1937; Day 1932; McCarthy 1930; Young 1941). Reflecting the behaviorist orientation of the times and seeking norms of language development, these studies boasted large, carefully chosen samples and "objective" measures of language development. Groups of white children of different ages and social classes were compared on gross, formal measures such as mean length of response, median number of one-word responses, and amount of complexity. Standard tests of vocabulary and measures of egocentric versus social speech were also used. Most of the studies dealt with school-aged subjects. A few included children as young as two years of age (Day 1932; McCarthy 1930). These studies were considered by McCarthy under the head-

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8 Background ing "occupational group differences" in her 1954 review of the literature on language acquisition. The evidence was remarkably consistent: despite differences across studies in procedure, type of dependent measure, definition of social class, and age of children, the results always favored the middle-class group. McCarthy concluded that "there exists a marked relationship between socioeconomic status of the family and the child's linguistic development" (p. 586). In attempting to explain this relationship, McCarthy drew upon several other studies which purportedly showed that broadening or enriching experiences (e.g., travel, association with adults) promote language development, and restricting experiences (e.g., living in an orphanage) retard language development. These findings of environmental influence became a link between the evidence that children from the lower classes are less advanced linguistically and the belief that their parents fail to provide an adequate linguistic environment. McCarthy speculated that poor parents, being less competent linguistically, offer poorer models for language learning and provide less verbal stimulation. She added that their attitudes toward children and their habits of family life are not as conducive to language learning as those of more privileged parents. Further evidence supporting a relationship between social class and language development was obtained by Templin (1957), who conducted one of the last and best-known studies within the normative tradition. This study will serve as a representative case, illustrating the methods characteristic of early research in the field. Templin s sample consisted of 480 white children, ranging in age from three to eight years, divided equally by sex, and chosen according to parental occupation to be representative of the U.S. urban population. The older children were tested in the public schools; the younger children, in nursery schools or in their homes. All testing was done individually by trained examiners. Four aspects of language were explored: articulation of speech sounds, speech sound discrimination, sentence structure, and vocabulary. Only the measures of sentence structure and vocabulary are relevant here. Assessment of sentence structure was based upon the first fifty verbalizations made by the child to the examiner. Picture books and toys were presented in order to stimulate speech. All utterances were recorded in writing. From these speech samples the following group measures were derived: mean length of

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Background 9

response; mean length of five longest responses; median number of one-word responses; amount of complexity (e.g., incomplete, compound and complex, elaborated sentences); type of sentence (e.g., declarative, interrogative); and amount and type of subordination (e.g., noun, adjective). (Two other measures of sentence structure, grammatical inaccuracies and parts of speech, were not analyzed by social class.) "Vocabulary of recognition" was measured by standard vocabulary tests appropriate to the age of the subject. The three-to-fiveyear-olds identified pictures that corresponded to the words of the Ammons Full Range Picture Vocabulary Test. Older children received a modified version of the Seashore-Eckerson English Recognition Vocabulary Test, a multiple-choice test of word meanings, orally presented. In addition, a "vocabulary of use" score was obtained for all subjects by computing the number of different Words in the child's first fifty verbalizations. When comparisons were made across social class (combining the age and sex subgroups), the higher-status group generally scored significantly higher than the lower-status group on measures of language structure and vocabulary. Of sixty-two social class comparisons within age groups on these measures, 42 percent significantly favored the higher-status group, 6 percent significantly favored the lower-status group, and the remaining 52 percent yielded nonsignificant results. 1 The normative studies reviewed by McCarthy and Templins sequel to that research are notable for their careful sampling of large numbers of children from relatively well defined populations and for their introduction of objective measures to the study of language development. However, these early investigations of the relationship between social class and language development contain many methodological and interpretational flaws that cast doubt upon McCarthy s conclusion. In order to evaluate the evidence from the normative studies and to anticipate criticisms of later research, I will discuss these problems at length. First of all, consider the problems involved in recording child speech at a time when electronic recording equipment was not widely used. Recording by hand precluded subsequent checking and revision. Although the problem of unreliability of recording 'These percentages are based on my calculations, using the information presented in Table 71 (p. 149), which is a summary of the t-values for social class differences on the major language measures.

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Background

was recognized, attempts to estimate the extent of inter-observer agreement were directed at the coding of data rather than the recording of data. 2 Consequently, it is impossible to know to what degree the original, hand-written observations were reliable. This leads to the question of whether problems in recording artifactually influenced the results in favor of the lower or middle classes. Obviously, it is easier to hand-record speech that is familiar in its form, content, and style. To the extent that a middle-class examiner was less familiar with these aspects of the speech of children from the lower classes, he or she would be less able to understand and accurately record their speech. Moreover, if examiners held the still common belief that poor people use "bad" or "primitive" speech, they may have "heard" less advanced structures from poor children and more advanced structures from middle-class children. As a result of these possible distortions, one would expect less accurate and complete recordings of the speech of children from the lower classes. Since all of the grammatical analyses and one of the vocabulary measures were based on these data, it is conceivable that poor children were penalized at the outset, relative to middle-class children. Of course, there is no way to prove that such distortions occurred. But anyone who has tried to transcribe spontaneous child speech—from the best of electronic recordings—is aware of the difficulties. Unlike the early researchers, we now have the luxury of replaying and rechecking many times over. This does not eliminate our biases, but it affords some protection against them. Examination of the measures of language development used in the normative studies reveals several problems here as well. First, these studies defined linguistic maturity in terms of the adult model: such categories as type of sentence and amount of complexity—which may be insensitive to the regularities in child language —were imposed on the data. These measures are especially inappropriate for children from the lower classes who learn dialects which differ from Standard English. One wonders, for example, whether their use of nonstandard forms elevated their scores on "incomplete sentences" and depressed their scores on "complex-

2 For example, Day (1932) presented inter-observer reliability coefficients on the "method of recordings." However, the coefficients actually referred to the degree to which observers agreed on the classification of responses (e.g., simple sentence, incomplete sentence, naming). Comparisons of the form of actual utterances recorded by different examiners were not rtlade.

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Background

11

ity," or whether their vocabularies were underestimated by tests of Standard English vocabulary. In addition, several of the measures of sentence structure (e.g., mean number of words per response, mean number of words per five longest responses, median number of one-word responses) overlapped, resulting in an exaggerated estimate of the extent of social class differences. That is, when measures are not independent of one another, a significant difference on one tends to be reflected in the others as well. Still other questions may be raised about the comparability of the experimental situation. Investigators clearly attempted to apply uniform procedures and to establish rapport with their subjects. However, to be tested at home or in school by a strange, middle-class adult may mean one thing to a middle-class child and something quite different to a lower-class child. As a result, the amount and complexity of speech obtained from each may have differed under these circumstances. 3 In light of these methodological problems, it appears that the normative studies lend no support to the hypothesis that white children from the lower classes are less able or less advanced linguistically than their middle-class peers. In fact, the evidence is inadequate to sustain any conclusion about the relationship between social class and language development, since variables other than social class were not controlled. Emerging from this critique are three methodological issues of particular relevance to social class comparisons of language development: inaccurate recording, inappropriate measures, and noncomparable situations. All of these issues rest on the requirement that experimental conditions be equivalent for the two groups under comparison. Obviously, if children from different backgrounds are to be reasonably compared, each group must be given an equal opportunity to perform optimally. Two of the issues raised here—inappropriate measures and noncomparable situations—anticipate major lines of criticism directed at studies of "verbal deprivation." These criticisms will be discussed more fully below. 3

McCarthy (1954) did not raise this issue in connection with social class comparisons of language, but her review includes a section called "Effects of Situation" in which she anticipated a major issue in the study of child language. She states, "Apparently there are sufficient differences in the same children's use of language from one situation to another to make it extremely hazardous to infer that a given sample is representative of a child's language development in general" (p. 596).

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12 Background STUDIES OF "VERBAL DEPRIVATION"

During the 1960s many educators and psychologists became concerned with a pressing educational and social problem: the high rates of scholastic failure among "disadvantaged" children. At a time when black Americans were demanding equal rights, the emphasis fell particularly on black children from the inner city. The verbal-deprivation position arose within this context. One of its major tenets was that poor children enter school with a language deficit that ill equips them to handle the cognitive and linguistic requirements of the classroom. Support for this view was drawn from the abundant evidence that poor children of school age and slightly younger performed less well than their middle-class peers on IQ tests and other measures of verbal ability that relate to success in school (e.g., Deutsch and Associates 1967; Hess and Shipman 1965; John 1963; Keller 1963; Klaus and Gray 1968). Eventually linguists and anthropologists began to challenge this interpretation (Baratz 1970, 1973; Houston 1970; Labov 1970; Leacock 1972; Stewart 1970). They pointed out that the instruments used in these studies measured knowledge of Standard English, the native language of most middle-class children, but not of most poor children. They asserted that the dialects which poor children learn in their communities differ from Standard English, but, like all languages, are highly structured, abstract systems that serve as effective tools for thinking and communicating. Another objection to these studies was voiced by Labov (1970) and Cole and Bruner (1971). They argued that the use of equivalent experimental procedures does not guarantee equivalence of experimental treatment for groups from different socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds. To ask both groups the identical question is to achieve only the most superficial level of experimental control. The child's motivation and his or her interpretation of the question or of what constitutes an appropriate reply are left uncontrolled. As a result, experimental conditions that appear to be identical may, in fact, have very different meanings for children from different backgrounds. What one group regards as an occasion for reticence the other may regard as an occasion for verbal display. In a similar vein, Cazden (1970) criticized both the deficientlanguage and the different-language positions for their preoccupation with structural forms, pointing out that neither dealt with patterns of language use or acknowledged the situational relativity of children's speech. She called for a broadened conception of language which includes "how the child perceives and categorizes the

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Background

13

social situations of his world and differentiates his ways of speaking accordingly" (p. 84). The criticisms presented so far were directed at the inference that poor children suffer from a language deficit. Proponents of the language-deprivation position also speculated about the origin of this purported deficit. They occasionally mentioned inadequacies in the school or inequalities of the social system as contributing to the educational difficulties of disadvantaged children. But the core of the argument centered on the family: they argued that poor children arrive at school already handicapped by the cultural and linguistic deficiencies of their home environments. A great many deficiencies were posited. Deutsch (1963) proposed that poor families are less likely to expose their children to a variety of verbal material or to speech sequences that are continuous and syntactically well organized; that they fail to stimulate the child's memory, to provide adequate verbal feedback, to pose and reward tasks involving language and conceptual processes, to encourage the identification of objects or the asking of questions. Deutsch also suggested that the paucity of toys and other objects in poor homes adversely affects the child's perceptual skills and that the crowded, noisy conditions promote inattention. Hunt (1969) speculated that poor parents are unlikely to give answers to the young child who seeks the names of objects. If they do answer, their responses are likely to be so punishing as to inhibit further questioning. In Hunt's view, poor parents do not help their children to abstract such attributes as color, shape, and size or to discern relationships among people and things or to encode such relationships linguistically. According to Hess and Shipman (1965), the mothers of poor children do not communicate meaningfully to their children, and use teaching strategies which discourage reflection and mediation of behavior by verbal cues. Other proponents of the language-deprivation position referred to the lack of organized family activities such as regularly scheduled meals at which child and adult might converse (Keller 1963); to the tendency of poor parents to disapprove of fantasy and symbolic play (Black 1966); to their failure to encourage the use of language to express emotions, intentions, and desires or to consider alternatives or to develop the means to delay gratification (B. Bloom, Davis, and Hess 1965); and to various other factors that supposedly impede cognitive and linguistic growth. This list embodies a powerful, negative stereotype of poor people. Moreover, as Baldwin and Baldwin (1973) pointed out, these hypotheses rarely have been tested against observations of families

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Background

interacting in their homes. Higgins (1976) too concluded that we have very little in the way of systematic observation of parentchild interaction in different social classes. However, there are some outstanding exceptions in the form of detailed descriptions of poor children and their families. Coles (1967, 1971a, 1971/?, 1977) has worked for many years with poor blacks from the South, migrants, Eskimos, Indians, sharecroppers, Chicanos, Appalachians, and other groups, entering their worlds time and again to listen and observe.4 These families, as portrayed by Coles, bear little resemblance to the families of "verbal deprivation." Instead we see individuals who daily face the stresses of poverty, who speak eloquently upon occasion, care deeply about their children, and struggle in diverse and intelligent ways to raise them. Another important exception is McConochie's (1976) intensive observational study of three infants from low-income families in South Baltimore. Video recordings were made in the homes at biweekly intervals during the first nine months of life. These tapes, plus interviews with the families and other sources of data, provided the basis for a detailed account of infant social development within the family context. McConochie found similarities across the three children in their behaviors with respect to objects, people, and self. By the ninth month, Felicity, Ricky, and Amy were learning the social functions of objects. They participated in a variety of social interactions, including simple reciprocal games, and were becoming increasingly aware of the complex interrelationships among self, others, and objects. Equally important were the striking individual differences with respect to social learning about objects, people, and self. This variation seemed to be related both to differences in the children's temperament and to differences in their social environments—in their families' attitudes, social orientation, and styles of interacting. All of the children obtained average or above average scores on the Bayley Mental Development Scale. This study provided no evidence that the parents were inadequate or that the babies were deficient socially or cognitively. It also underscores what is often overlooked in comparative studies of class, namely the tremendous individual variation within each group. Also notable is Ward's (1971) observational study of language learning in the black community of Rosepoint in rural Louisiana. She described patterns of language socialization, pointing out a 4 See also Coles and Coles (1978), which is a collection of portraits of women from several of these groups.

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n u m b e r of differences between Rosepoint and white, middle-class communities. Language development occurred in the context of large extended families in which other children provided an important linguistic resource. Adults conversed less with young children, and there was little talk for the sake of talking. Rather, adult speech to children served primarily practical and administrative functions. Adults rarely expanded children's utterances but routinely repeated, paraphrased, or expanded their own utterances. Ward noted that the children of Rosepoint were not taught many of the literacy-related skills necessary for school achievement, but that they were in no sense culturally deprived. Like children from mainstream backgrounds, they were learning the local dialect and the local norms of appropriate speech and conduct. The literature on mothers' speech to young children includes a few studies (Baldwin and Baldwin 1973; Holzman 1974; Snow, Arlman-Rupp, Hassing, Jobse, Joosten, and Vorster 1976) that are relevant to the issue of class differences in early linguistic environments. In each study the investigators made social class comparisons of mothers' speech to young children under free-play conditions. A variety of measures were used, including syntactic complexity, discourse structures, and type of content. All three studies reported striking similarities across class, with few if any differences in the way that mothers talked to young children. In sum, there is very little evidence concerning the natural environments in which young children from poor families learn language. However, the results of intensive observational studies (some of which did not focus on language) and of a few studies of language input are inconsistent with the claim that children from the lower classes are cognitively or linguistically deprived during the early years of life. OTHER RECENT STUDIES

In addition to the verbal-deprivation studies, there have been a n u m b e r of other recent studies of the language abilities of white children from the lower classes. These studies share several features with the research reviewed thus far. They are comparative in design (lower classes versus middle classes), and the vast majority are cross-sectional. Conducted most often in school settings, these studies have dealt primarily with school-aged subjects, occasionally with three-to-five-year-olds, and never with younger children. These studies may be classified according to the type of dependent variable: linguistic complexity, dialect features, psycholinguistic

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16 Background abilities, and uses of language. These sections include a great deal of methodological detail. For readers who are not interested in these technical matters, a summary is provided at the end of each section. Linguistic Complexity. Baldwin and Baldwin (1973) conducted an observational study of five-year-olds interacting with their mothers in a free-play, laboratory setting. The data were audio- or video-recorded. The sample consisted of twenty white children and thirty-eight black children. Within each ethnic group subjects were divided into two status groups on the basis of parents' educational level. A measure of syntactic complexity which took into account such factors as modifying elements, clause combinations, and question transformations was applied to the children's utterances. Combining ethnic groups, the authors found no significant difference in the syntactic complexity of verbalizations made by children of different socioeconomic status. Cowan, Weber, Hoddinott, and Klein (1967) also failed to find social class differences in a study that used mean length of response as the measure of linguistic complexity. Twenty-four children at each of four ages (five, seven, nine, and eleven years) served as subjects, divided equally by sex and socioeconomic status. Each child was seen individually by one of two experimenters who presented ten pictures for the child to describe. Although no main effect of social class was found, significant interactions between social class and sex and among social class, age, and sex were reported. The stimulus, experimenter, and age-of-subject variables produced the largest effects on mean length of response. Two other studies reported significant social class differences on some measures of linguistic complexity but not on others. For their investigation of syntactic elaboration, Williams and Naremore (1969a) selected a sample of forty fifth- and sixth-grade children, balanced as to socioeconomic status. Each of the two status groups consisted of equal numbers of black and white and of male and female children. Speech samples were audio-recorded in the children's homes by interviewers who offered three topics for discussion. Analysis of these data was based upon a model of structural description involving hierarchical levels (sentence, clause, and phrase, with subdivisions within each) and sentence parts (e.g., direct object, verb, indirect object). Among the white children, no consistent social class differences emerged on measures of the hierarchical level of verbalizations within specific linguistic environments (i.e., subject, verb, adverb, or complement hierarchy). As for the remaining measures, the white middle-status group exceeded

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Background 17 the white lower-status group in the frequency with which they used the following constructions: relative clause, complement, subject elaboration, complement elaboration. However, the two groups did not differ with respect to sentences, adverb elaboration, subordination, and coordination. Significant interactions between status and topic, status and race, and status and sex emerged on some of these measures. Van der Geest, Gerstel, Appel, and Tervoort (1973) studied three- and four-year-old boys from three social classes in the Netherlands. Spontaneous speech samples consisting of the first hundred utterances produced by each subject were obtained in nursery schools attended regularly by the children. The utterances and accompanying nonverbal aspects of the situation were handrecorded by two adults who followed the child about the playroom. As mentioned earlier, hand-recording is problematic under any circumstances, but especially when children of different social classes are involved. The middle-class group obtained significantly higher scores than both of the working-class groups on all five traditional language measures: n u m b e r of different words, mean length of sentence, mean length of five longest sentences, number of one-word sentences, and type/token ratio. The data were also classified according to a complicated scheme for determining syntactic complexity. These measures yielded inconsistent results when analyzed by class. In sum, the results of these four studies suggest no clear conclusion about the linguistic complexity of the speech of children from different classes. This is not surprising, since the studies used diverse measures of linguistic complexity and varied with respect to definition of social class, situation in which speech was sampled, and age of subjects. Also, it is questionable whether the measures of linguistic complexity were appropriate for children from different backgrounds. In principle, such measures should give the same credit to dialect variants of the same structure. However, it is not clear whether investigators recognized nonstandard features. Finally, the experimental situations were probably not equivalent for children from different classes, a point acknowledged by the investigators. In fact, situational factors such as setting, topic, and experimenter figured importantly in their interpretations. For example, Baldwin and Baldwin noted that their findings are applicable only to similar free-play situations, thereby restricting their generaliza-

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18 Background tions to the type of setting in which the behaviors were observed. Conclusions about class differences in linguistic complexity were similarly qualified: differences were viewed as reflecting, in part, knowledge of different norms of language use. This contrasts with earlier claims that such findings constitute evidence that children from the lower classes are less capable or less advanced linguistically than their middle-class peers. However, the recent findings reveal very little about either the norms of language use that are learned by members of different social classes or about related distributions of linguistic forms. This is not surprising since the methods used and the type of evidence obtained do not differ substantially from those of the earlier normative studies. Dialect Features. A basic assumption underlying the next several studies is that dialect features correlate with one's position in the social hierarchy. Investigators attempted to document dialect features in the speech of children from different backgrounds. In these studies Standard English served as a reference point for the identification of nonstandard forms, not as an ideal against which to measure the language development of poor children. A study by Garvey and McFarlane (1968) included sixty-eight white and sixty black fifth- and sixth-graders from segregated schools in the most economically depressed sections of Baltmore. Thirty white, middle-class children from a segregated school in the same city constituted a "baseline" comparison group. Rather than sample the full range of speech styles available to the children, the authors attempted to identify the nonstandard language structures produced in a controlled situation. In order to elicit a careful or formal speech style an imitation task was used. Subjects were asked to repeat each of sixty orally presented Standard English sentences, representing fifteen target structures. Their responses were audio-recorded. It was assumed that the poor children would translate or transpose these structures into their own nonstandard dialects. When the data were examined for transpositions resulting in nonstandard forms, the following five structures yielded the highest percentages for the inner-city white children: reflexive pronoun (52.2 percent), embedded question "whether" (39.1 percent), demonstrative pronoun (32.3 percent), plural verb (28.6 percent), and clause introducer (20.5 percent). Compared with black children, they produced substantially more nonstandard forms on embedded question "whether" and slightly more on reflexive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, negative concord, and relatives.

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The findings for both groups of poor children contrasted with the very low transposition scores of the middle-class group. 5 A similar elicited imitation task was used by Anastasiow and Haines (1976). They reported that poor white children from a rural area "reconstructed" Standard English forms into dialect forms at a rate of about 50 percent. This compared with about 68 percent for inner-city black children of the same age (kindergarten, first grade, second grade). They inferred from this that many lower-class children speak a dialect which differs from Standard English. However, it is difficult to evaluate these findings, as the samples and procedures were very sketchily described. Also, the authors did not explain why their sample of white middle-class children, who presumably speak Standard English, also reconstructed at a rate of about 50 percent. Garvey and Dickstein (1970) applied three levels of linguistic analysis—referential, lexical, and grammatical—to possessive constructions produced by fifth-graders. Forty-eight dyads—homogeneous as to social class, sex, and race—were formed. White examiners of the same sex as the dyad administered the experimental task. The members of each dyad were provided with complementary information needed for solving three problems. A screen separated the pair, forcing them to rely on speech alone. Analysis of the transcribed, tape-recorded interactions of dyads (not individuals) revealed no social class differences in the frequency with which the possessive construction was used. When choice of possessive verb was examined, the results indicated that lowerstatus children, regardless of race, used got significantly more frequently than did the middle-class group, which favored have. The grammatical analysis involved tabulation of the following nonstandard features: lack of subject-verb agreement in positive and negative constructions with have and positive constructions with got; use of ain't or don't as negative auxiliary with got; and absence of auxiliary verb when got or have is the main verb in Wh-questions and got is the main verb in declarative clauses. Comparison of the various subgroups on relative frequency of nonstandard features indicated that lower-class children produced more nonstandard features than middle-class children, and blacks produced more than whites. 5

The white middle-class children transposed eight of the fifteen structures into nonstandard forms, but only one score (reflexive pronoun) exceeded 5 percent.

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20

Background

Bruck and Tucker (1974) tried to identify the parameters of children s language in a kindergarten classroom. Twenty subjects were selected from each of two kindergartens, one in a lower-class area, the other in a middle-class area in Montreal. Several tests of grammatical and communicative competence were administered at the beginning and end of the school year by two female experimenters. Two grammatical factors and four communication factors emerged from a factor analysis of the children's scores on twentysix variables. Only the grammatical factors will be considered here. (The measures of communication will be discussed below under "Uses of Language.") In general, the effects of social class varied with the specific ability tested. On all tests which loaded on Factor I, "productive knowledge of classroom grammar," the less privileged children performed less well than the middle-class children. That is, they produced more grammatical errors when answering questions about a picture, asking questions of a doll, and retelling a story.6 During the course of the school year, both groups of children improved significantly in their performance on the first two tasks, with the poor children improving especially rapidly. The authors suggested that social class differences on these measures reflect dialect differences and differences in attentional skills. The other grammatical factor identified by Bruck and Tucker was termed "grammatical comprehension of classroom English" (Factor VI). However, this seems to be a misnomer for two reasons. First, this factor was defined by three scores derived from an elicited imitation test. Also, the "object manipulation test," which required that the child manipulate objects in response to a command, did not correlate with Factor VI, though it seems to be a much more appropriate measure of comprehension. The lower-class children made significantly more errors on the object manipulation test than did the middle-class children. But on the three elicited imitation scores —total imitation errors, phrase structure errors, and transformational errors—no social class differences emerged. Still another imitation score, morphological errors, did not load on Factor VI but yielded a significant social class difference favoring the middle-class group. It is difficult to interpret this scattered pattern of results. Once again, dialect differences may be involved. Also, as the authors suggested, the two groups may have varied in their in6

Apparently, only the responses to the storytelling task were audio-recorded.

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terpretation of the task. This possibility will be discussed below, under "Uses of Language." In sum, these studies employed a variety of experimental tasks to elicit speech, which, in several cases, was audio-recorded. The findings consistently indicated that white children from the lower classes use a variety of grammatical constructions and lexical items which differ from both Standard English and Black English. Psycholinguistic Abilities. Peisach (1965) expected that children would be better able to understand speech samples that were similar in style to their own. In order to test this prediction, she used the Cloze technique to investigate the ability of elementary school children to understand samples of teacher speech and peer speech. Sixty-four first-graders and sixty-two fifth-graders, matched within each grade on socioeconomic status, race, and sex, received auditorily presented paragraphs from which words were omitted. 7 Subjects' attempts to supply the missing words were scored as absolute (the insertion was identical with the deletion), contextual (the insertion maintained the meaning of the paragraph), and grammatical (the insertion belonged to the same part of speech as the deletion). Both first- and fifth-graders heard samples of teacher speech obtained during typical classroom sessions. The pattern of results was mixed: there were no social class differences on some measures, but on others the middle-class group performed significantly better than the lower-class group. Comprehension of peer speech was explored only among the fifth-graders, using passages derived from recordings of children's speech. Samples from each of four children were selected: a middle-class black girl, a middle-class white boy, a lower-class white girl, and a lower-class black boy. Only absolute scores were computed. The results indicated no social class differences in the children's ability to replace the identical deletion from samples of lower-class peer speech. On the middle-class speech samples, middle-class children obtained significantly higher absolute scores than did lower-class subjects. Unfortunately, the study did not provide information about the specific characteristics of the stimuli (e.g., dialect features, stylistic features) that were responsible for similarities and differences in comprehension. 7 The study included a second sample of fifth-grade students who received a written form of the same Cloze procedure. Since reading skill is not relevant to the present study, I do not discuss these results.

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22 Background Peisach's use of both lower-class and middle-class speech samples results in a relatively equitable assessment of the performance of children from different backgrounds. Another way of achieving appropriate measures for different children is by using stimulus materials that are equally unknown to all subjects, such as nonsense words. This was the approach taken by LaCivita, Kean, and Yamamoto (1966) in their investigation of children's ability to use linguistic cues—grammatical morphemes, articles, positions of words in sentences—to identify the parts of speech of nonsense words. The sample consisted of approximately twenty males and twenty females from each of three grades—second, fourth, and sixth—in three schools. The majority of students from two of the schools came from middle-class backgrounds, whereas the majority in the third school came from the lower classes. The experimental task involved the simultaneous oral and written presentation of six sentences containing nonsense words (e.g., "Ungubily the mittler gimmled."). The subject tried to guess the meaning of the underlined word. Half of the sentences utilized only articles or word endings (-ed, -s, -ly) as signals to indicate parts of speech. The remaining sentences included both signals and position as syntactic clues. The experimenter classified the subject's responses as nouns, verbs, and modifiers and judged whether he or she had given the appropriate parts of speech. The authors reported no significant differences between the two social class groups at any grade level in ability to use syntactic clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. This finding is not surprising in light of the following considerations: (1) middle class and lower class were defined in such a way that there was overlap between the groups; (2) several of the syntactic clues (position, articles) signal part of speech in both Standard English and nonstandard dialects. Shriner and Miner (1968) also used nonsense syllables in their study of the acquisition of morphological rules. The sample included twenty-five disadvantaged children whose parents were participating in a federally sponsored vocational training program. Twenty-five advantaged children attending a private nursery school in the same community were matched to the disadvantaged children on the basis of sex and scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Unfortunately, this matching procedure may be faulted on the following grounds. A total of sixty-three advantaged children had to be tested in order to find twenty-five children who matched the disadvantaged children on the above criteria. This means that all

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the available disadvantaged children were compared to a select subset of the advantaged children, namely those who scored relatively low on the vocabulary test. (The mean scores for the disadvantaged and advantaged groups were 89 and 90, respectively, on a test standardized to yield an average score of 100.) Assuming a correlation between knowledge of Standard English vocabulary and knowledge of Standard English morphological rules, matching on a test of the first will necessarily offset social class differences on a test of the second. Both groups then received an adapted version of a test which is designed to tap expressive and receptive knowledge of morphological rules as applied to nonsense syllables. In the expressive subtest the specific morphemes under question were the following: plural -5, possessive -s, progressive -ing, past tense -ed, and third person singular present tense -5. The task consisted of auditorily presented stimuli paired with appropriate pictures. In the receptive task only noun pluralization was tested, and the subject pointed to the appropriate picture. No significant class differences were found on total scores, expressive and receptive scores, or scores for specific morphological rules. However, these findings cannot be taken at face value, owing to the sampling problem mentioned above. In sum, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from these three studies. In each case the measures were relatively equivalent for both social class groups, and, in general, children of different backgrounds performed similarly. However, because of methodological problems, it is unclear how to interpret these findings. Uses of Language. The theorizing of the British sociologist Bernstein (1959, 1964, 1970, 1972a) bears on the issue of how children from different social classes use language. He identified two language codes which differ in the principles that regulate the selection of linguistic options. A restricted code is characterized by a high probability of predicting syntactic alternatives; implicit, impersonal meanings; and heavy reliance upon nonverbal channels. An elaborated code is characterized by a low probability of predicting structural elements; explicit, personalized meanings; and heavy reliance upon the verbal channel. Bernstein maintained that these codes are a function of the type of social relations to which the speakers are exposed. He predicted that lower-class children are more likely to use a restricted code, which arises from the closely shared identifications, social solidarity, and orientation to status which characterize their family relationships. Bernstein's theory has generated considerable research, but

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24 Background most of it has focused on the speech of adolescents (Bernstein 1962a, 1962&; Lawton 1963,1964,1968; Robinson 1965) and will not be discussed here. Four studies attempted to test aspects of the theory with respect to five-year-olds (Hawkins 1969; Henderson 1970a, 1970b; Rackstraw and Robinson 1967). Social class differences emerged in three of the four studies. (Rackstraw and Robinson [1967] claimed empirical support for Bernstein's position, but, in fact, most of their measures did not significantly differentiate the working-class and middle-class groups.) In all of these studies the relative frequency of different linguistic forms or types of content was used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of communication. This type of interpretation is fallacious because it fails to take into account the communicative requirements of the task to which the subject responded. Hawkins (1969) is a case in point. He used two experimental tasks: three series of picture cards designed to promote narrative speech and three paintings designed to promote descriptive speech. In both cases the stimuli remained in view as the subject responded. Significantly more working-class than middle-class children used deictic forms that referred outward to the environment of the speaker. In contrast, the middle-class children used more lexically explicit forms. Hawkins interpreted these findings as supporting Bernstein's restricted/elaborated distinction, arguing that the speech of the working-class subjects was context-bound. However, given the requirements of the task, one could just as well argue that the speech of the middle-class children was redundant. Since the stimuli were visible to both the child and the listener, there was no need to provide a detailed linguistic representation of the visual information. (See Hill 1977a and \911b for a detailed analysis of this study.) Williams and Naremore (1969 b) leveled a similar criticism against the Bernstein group for relying upon tallies of linguistic forms. They undertook instead a functional analysis of the speech of fifth- and sixth-graders in an interview situation. Of interest here is their classification of the children's responses in terms of the type of probe which preceded them. The white lower-class children tended to produce simple responses to probes which could be minimally answered by a yes or no. This contrasted with the tendency of the white middle-class children to elaborate their responses to simple probes. These two groups did not differ with respect to the speech styles that they used in response to probes that required naming or elaboration. Social class comparisons within the subsample of black subjects yielded similar findings. The au-

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thors concluded that all of the children met the communicative demands of the interviewers' probes, but the lower-class children sometimes provided the minimal response. Still other evidence that fits this pattern was reported by Bruck and Tucker (1974), whose study of kindergarten children was described earlier. They found that children from poorer backgrounds performed similarly to middle-class children on many measures of ambiguity and egocentficity but not on measures of explicitness. For example, when retelling a story, the poorer children included fewer relevant details than their middle-class peers. In describing abstract designs not visible to the experimenter, they gave fewer images and fewer elaborations of those images. The authors concluded that lower-class children know the relevant information but fail to communicate it because they do not understand the communicative demands of the task. Other students of language use have asked whether there are social class differences in children's ability to use language for referential purposes. That is, the focus here falls on the abilities involved in communicating in a way that enables the listener to identify what the speaker refers to. This type of communication has been studied most often in structured, experimental settings. Glucksberg, Krauss, and Higgins (1975) reviewed the literature on the development of referential communication and concluded that social class differences in communicative skills have not been demonstrated. In sum, the literature on the uses of language does not as yet yield clear patterns with respect to similarities or differences between children of different social classes. However, there is some suggestive evidence that children from less privileged backgrounds tend to give less verbally explicit responses, or that children from middle-class backgrounds tend to give more redundant responses on structured, experimental tasks. CONCLUSIONS

A number of significant themes emerge from this review. First, there is virtually no evidence about the early language development of white children from the lower classes. The vast majority of studies have asked how school-aged subjects deal with schoolrelated tasks in school settings—reflecting the interest of many researchers in practical, educational problems. Second, five decades of study have witnessed substantial changes in theory. Early research on social class and language development took a normative approach that was largely atheoretical. Although the evidence consistently showed that lower-class

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26 Background children performed less well than their middle-class peers on measures of language development, it now appears that the experimental conditions themselves placed the less privileged children at a disadvantage. In light of this problem it was concluded that the normative studies tell us very little about the language development of poor children. The same is true of studies that used IQ and other standard measures of verbal ability. In the 1960s the findings of these studies were taken as support for the language-deprivation position. According to this view, children from the lower classes suffer from a language disability which originates in the cultural and linguistic inadequacies of their home environments. This position was disputed by linguists and anthropologists who asserted that poor children learn different dialects and different norms of language use. These claims have received some support from the limited n u m b e r of recent studies that dealt with these aspects of language. Despite major changes in theoretical outlook, a single research p a r a d i g m has prevailed from the 1930s to the 1970s: the less privileged are compared with the more privileged on a single occasion. The exclusive reliance upon this paradigm promotes a type of distortion described by Leacock (1971) in her critique of the "culture of poverty" concept: " . . . the tendency in discussions of class differences in behavior is for them to become exaggerated by being stated in terms of polar opposites" (p. 25). That is, comparisons of this sort tend to emphasize differences between the groups, at the expense of both similarities across groups and variation within each group. Moreover, because the lower-class groups are compared only to more privileged groups and only on school-related tasks, class differences tend to be viewed implicitly or explicitly from the perspective of the middle-class norm. Bernstein (1972&) has pointed out that "The very form our research takes tends to confirm the beliefs underlying the organization, transmission, and evaluation of knowledge by the school . . . Research very rarely challenges or exposes the social assumptions underlying what counts as valid knowledge, or what counts as a valid realization of that knowledge" (p. 139). In other words, the paradigm itself affirms what some children know while devaluing what other children know. Recent research on child language suggests some different lines of inquiry which might be fruitfully adapted to the study of children from the lower classes.

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Studies of Child Language The study of early language development has a long history, beginning with the diaries that psychologists and linguists kept, charting the development of their own children (e.g., Guillaume 1927; Leopold 1939-1949). Later, under the impact of behaviorism, these diary studies were replaced by the large, cross-sectional studies that attempted to identify developmental milestones (McCarthy 1954). In the 1950s researchers began to inquire into the child's knowledge of the linguistic system and demonstrated that children learn rules for combining linguistic units (Brown 1957; Berko 1958). But it was not until the 1960s that the study of child language came into its own. The upsurge of interest was inspired, in large measure, by Chomsky's (1957, 1965) theory of generative transformational grammar. In opposition to the prevailing behaviorist view, Chomsky asserted the rationalist position that language is an innate faculty of the human mind. He drew attention to the similarities among all natural languages (linguistic universals), to the innovative quality of language (linguistic creativity), and to the capacity of all healthy children to learn the language to which they are exposed. Within the framework of this theory, language acquisition was portrayed as a remarkable feat: within a few years, and on the basis of a limited sample of speech, children discover a grammar (system of rules) that enables them to produce and understand novel sentences. This theoretical focus on grammar led to an empirical search for the rules of grammar that account for children's early word combinations (Braine 1963; Brown and Bellugi 1964; Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi 1969; Brown and Fraser 1963; Miller and Ervin 1964). These studies involved small numbers of middle-class children from university communities. 8 Their spontaneous speech was recorded in their homes at regular intervals over a period of months or years. The data, consisting of large numbers of two- and threeword sentences, were analyzed separately by child according to the distribution of forms. Researchers consistently found that a small number of words occurred with high frequency and fixed order in children's early sentences. 8 An exception is Sarah, one of the children studied by Brown and his colleagues. Sarah's parents were high school graduates, and her father worked as a clerk. Also, Adam was black, the son of a minister.

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28 Background Bloom (1970) showed that this distribution of words reflects the kinds of meanings that children encode in their early word combinations. Operating within the same research paradigm, she collected longitudinal speech samples from three middle-class children w h o m she visited in their homes. She demonstrated that since young children talk in the "here and now," it is possible to infer the semantic intentions of their early sentences from the accompanying context (nonverbal behaviors and aspects of the situation) in relation to distributional characteristics of the corpus. The work of Bloom and others (Bowerman 1973; Halliday 1975; Macnamara 1972; Schlesinger 1971) marked a shift of focus from syntax to semantics in child language. At the same time a corresponding change occurred in theoretical outlook. The earlier emphasis on innate language competencies and biological maturation in explanations of language acquisition gave way to an emphasis on cognitive development as described by Piaget (1951, 1954). Children were portrayed as actively constructing a knowledge of objects, people, and events, a knowledge which was subsequently encoded in language. That is, language development came to be viewed as dependent upon the child's earlier cognitive development (e.g., Bloom 1970, 1973; Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975; Brown 1973; Nelson 1974). Most recently, the study of child language has shifted once more toward pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives (e.g., ErvinTripp and Mitchell-Kernan 1977; Garvey 1975; Ochs and Schieffelin 1979). With this shift, the question of what children know about language is enlarged to include not only syntax and semantics but the socially appropriate uses of speech, or communicative competence (Hymes 1974). How young children learn to converse, to form coherent discourse, to speak appropriately to different categories of persons, to perform speech acts and to organize them into speech events—all are topics of current interest. In addition, there is a strong interest in the natural contexts of language learning, including caregivers' speech, belief systems, and language socialization strategies. This brief overview of research during the past fifteen years suggests some similarities across children within the homogeneous population of middle-class, Standard English-speaking subjects who have been the focus of study. Research during this time also has been unusually respectful of individual differences among children. From the beginning, researchers did not combine data across subjects. They asked what individual children know about Ian-

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guage and how that knowledge changes over time. As a result of this dual interest in similarities and differences across children, we now know that there is remarkable consistency in the content of early language development but substantial individual variation in form (Bloom and Lahey 1978; Leonard 1976). For example, Bloom (1970), Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975), Lightbown (1977), Nelson (1975), Ramer (1976), and Schiff (1976) reported that some children learn a system of pronominal reference, whereas others learn a system of nominal reference for encoding the same kinds of meanings. Bloom, Hood, and Lightbown (1974) found variation in the extent to which young children imitate. In Hood and B l o o m s (1979) study of the development of causal expressions, three patterns of clause order emerged. In a study of complex sentences, Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter, and Fiess (1980) found differences in the rank order of acquisition of connectives, but similarity in the meaning relations that the children expressed. Among the results of Nelson s (1973) longitudinal study of children s first words was the finding that object names predominated for some children, whereas social or expressive words predominated for others. Lieven (1978) reported individual differences in the conversational styles of young children and their mothers. This interest in language acquisition on the individual level coexisted with an interest in language acquisition across languages and cultures. At first, discussion centered on the question of language universals in the Chomskyian sense, with McNeill (1966) proposing that linguistic categories themselves are innate. Later, language development was viewed as reflecting a universal course of cognitive development (Slobin 1973). Empirical work on early language development ranged across a variety of languages, including, for example, Finnish (Bowerman 1973), Canadian French (Lightbown 1977), and German (Park 1974). Several studies of n o n - I n d o European languages were conducted along the lines suggested by Slobin s (1967) field manual (Blount 1969; Kernan 1969; Omar 1970; Solberg 1971; Stross 1969). Schieffelin (1979a, 19796) critically examined the methodology of these studies and used an alternative, ethnographic approach in studying early language development among the Kaluli of New Guinea. Despite this concern with language development in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, no efforts have been made to extend the careful, in-depth, observational study of early language development to children of different social and ethnic origins within the United States. Conspicuously absent, for example, are stud-

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Background

ies of black children and of white children from working-class backgrounds. 9 Studying Language Development in South Baltimore: Toward a Fairer Assessment of Knowledge So far I have considered two research traditions of relevance to the present study. The first raises the theoretical question of a relationship between social class and language development and poses the social problem of a relationship between social class and success in school. Research within this tradition has compared school-aged children from different social classes in a manner often invidious to the less privileged. The second tradition has asked what individual children know about the form, meaning, and uses of language during the early years of life. Research has focused on middle-class American children and taken the form of observational studies conducted under relatively naturalistic conditions over a period of months or years. This tradition has stimulated much cross-cultural work but no comparable studies of children of different social and ethnic origins in the United States. The purpose of the present study is to describe the early language development of Amy, Wendy, and Beth, three children from the white working-class community of South Baltimore. It represents the first attempt to adapt the naturalistic, observational paradigm from the study of child language to a problem raised by the tradition of research on social class and language development. There are two ways in which this paradigm seems well suited for the problem. First, it seeks detailed descriptions of individuals. This focus on individuals affords some protection against the inclination to exaggerate class differences and to assume homogeneity within each group. It shares with ethology (e.g., BlurtonJones 1972; McGrew 1972) an emphasis on careful, comprehensive description as the critical first phase in the investigation of any phenomenon. From this perspective, group comparisons make sense only as they can be informed by descriptions of individuals from each group. Second, this paradigm involves repeated observation of children in their own homes—the place where language learning ordinarily occurs. At present, we know very little about 9 See, however, Blake (1979) which is a preliminary report of an in-depth study of early language development among poor, black children from New York City.

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the natural contexts in which children from the lower classes learn language during the early years of life. But in attempting to apply this paradigm in South Baltimore I found that a more explicitly ethnographic approach was needed. The studies of young, middle-class children, while relatively naturalistic, were not specifically designed to document the natural environments for language learning—the types and contexts and participants of verbal interaction. Nor did researchers explore the families' beliefs and values about children. The research strategy adopted here is most similar to that used by McConochie (1976) to study infant social development in South Baltimore and by Schieffelin (1979a, 1979/?) to study the development of communicative competence among the Kaluli of New Guinea. It combines careful observation of children in the contexts of everyday life with an inquiry into the beliefs and values by which families make sense of children's behavior. In other words, this strategy commits the researcher to go to the places where children are learning to speak and understand— to listen closely and repeatedly to each child and to those who, by example and instruction, with care and attention, assist in the learning of language. This is one way to better understand what children know. Another way is to compare how children of diverse cultures and communities learn language. The problem with limiting one's comparisons to groups of varying prestige within a single society is that the values which society attaches to those groups are particularly likely to intrude—and to influence assessments of knowledge. It is preferable, therefore, to ask not only how children from South Baltimore compare to middle-class American children but how they compare to children from France and Mexico and New Guinea. I do not mean to imply that scientific inquiry can ever be valuefree, only that multiple comparisons may help to keep our biases in check by broadening the frame of reference. The literature on child language contains some cross-cultural investigations to which the results of the present study will be compared. There is still another way to assess more fairly what people know, and this demands a critical look at the scientist-subject relationship. In a discussion of the validity of experimentally derived knowledge in psychology, Gadlin and Ingle (1975) stated, " . . . the subject-experimenter relationship is prescribed as a person-thing relationship in which . . . subjects are manipulable objects, that is, the experimenter-subject relationship is depersonalized because the 'objectivity' of the experimental method requires it" (p. 1005).

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32 Background

Conceived in these terms, the scientist is expert, the one who knows; the subject is ignorant, the one who is known. Gadlin and Ingle called for a different conception, one which acknowledges that the scientist and subject enter into a relationship as persons. Seen from this perspective, the subject is knowledgeable, capable of contributing in a direct way to the research enterprise itself. Gadlin and Ingle urged researchers to develop ways by which "we can learn from our subjects as well as from their performance" (p. 1008). They directed their comments to the experimental paradigm in the most general sense. But the argument against the traditional conception of the scientist-subject relationship is even more powerful, and the necessity for changing it becomes even more compelling, when the subjects are members of groups whose knowledge is not recognized as valid by the prevailing cultural ideology. The present study attempted to learn from the people who were intimately involved in language learning, who participated daily in this process, namely the families of the children.

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2

Procedures

Research Site: South Baltimore If you wanted to build an index of social class around the shopping area of South Baltimore, you would have to take into account that there are seven second-hand places along two blocks of South Charles Street, selling used furniture, clothing, appliances, gadgets, toys; that the clothing stores on Light Street year-round stock polyester and cotton house dresses, short-sleeved, with buttons down the front and two square patch pockets; that the restaurants open as early as 5:30 and close by early evening, in rhythm with the lives of working people to whom they serve up mugs of coffee, large Cokes, bean soup, French fries with gravy, Polish sausages, hamburgers, donuts, pie; that there is one bank (and one savings and loan association); that the Cross Street Market, established over one hundred years ago, offers fresh fish and meat and produce; that Cross Street splits in two around the Market, accommodating on the south branch a hardware store, Tiny s Pool Hall (now abandoned), a grocery, and bargain stores; on the north, rundown bars and an old comfort station; that at lunchtime Southern High releases its teenagers to the streets to join their peers already there, and they stand on corners, flaunting cigarettes, or hang out at Gino's, dreaming; that you can get CB radios, bouffant wigs, hunting gear, birthday cakes, record albums, big-wheel bikes, and statues of the Virgin Mary in the stores of South Baltimore.1 The people who shop here come from South Baltimore and nearby neighborhoods. Four communities share the peninsula that stretches southeast from downtown Baltimore into the harbor. South Baltimore is the largest of these, cutting a wide swath down the middle. On the west is the old, black community of Sharp'This description of South Baltimore is now (1982) somewhat dated. In the last few years the community has undergone some striking changes. Middleclass couples, encouraged by low-interest city loans and cheap housing, have flocked into the northern portions of the community, bringing with them the aesthetics of brass door knockers and smart "shoppes."

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34

Procedures

Leadenhall, on the northeast a colony of preservationists clustered around Federal Hill. The white working-class families of Locust Point occupy the eastern arm of the peninsula. Downtown Baltimore lies several blocks to the north of South Baltimore, separated from it by the harbor, by industry, and by large expanses of vacant lots, sacrificed to urban renewal and abortive expressways. South Baltimore is made of rowhouses: street after street and crowded alley of rowhouses, some brick but mostly beige and gray formstone, with marble or concrete or brick stoops, but always modest; two stories high or three (one and a half along Hamburg Street); and narrow, fifteen or twelve or eleven feet from wall to wall. The doors of these houses are colonial or Mediterranean in style, plain wood, in need of paint, with storm doors and without, left unlocked for the going in and out of children and relatives. There are plastic flowers in the windows, hanging plants, ceramic dogs. And more than any others in the city, these doors and windows reflect by embellishment the march of holidays. Hung at Halloween with cardboard witches, pumpkins, skeletons, homemade or from the 5 & 10, they yield by mid-November to turkeys and Hallmark pilgrims. These are, and always have been, the homes of working people. Many of the residents are descendants of German, Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants who occupied these houses in the nineteenth century. Others migrated from Appalachia, seeking jobs in the factories and on the wharves of South Baltimore. Most of the men are blue-collar workers, locally employed. The women keep house and care for children or work at low-skill jobs or both. In 1969 the median family income was $8,123. In that same year 21 percent of the families in South Baltimore lived on less than $5,000. Nine percent received public assistance.2 Surrounding the rowhouses, encroaching, providing livelihoods, are the manufacturers of spices, sugar, cardboard cartons, desk calendars, Christmas ornaments. The Bethlehem Steel shipyards lie to the north and east at the foot of Federal Hill. Here men repair freighters, container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers. Looming over Race Street on the west, at four or five times the height of a rowhouse, are the red storage tanks of the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, surrounded by a chain-linked, barbed-wire fence. Toward the south on Byrd Street the women at Marlenn Corporation operate machines that assemble 42,000 air fresheners on a good 2

The income statistics cited in this paragraph are based on the 1970 U.S. Census Reports.

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day. Several blocks south and west is the site of the Allied Chemical Plant, closed in 1976, manufacturer of arsenic compounds for one hundred years. Men who live in the vicinity have the highest rate of lung cancer in the city—four and one-half times the average. 3 Still further south and spreading east to Locust Point are the marshalling yards and export piers of the Baltimore and Ohio and Western Maryland railroads. South Baltimore continues to supply these places with workers, some with high school diplomas, others without. People tend to take jobs early, pair off and have children early. They move in with their parents or find an apartment in a rowhouse. The children learn and grow in families: a big, genial Appalachian clan, spanning three generations, spilling out of one rowhouse into others nearby; a middle-aged couple whose daughter works and brings the baby by at 7:00 A.M.; a grandmother who babysits at night when parents go to the corner bar; a woman with two children, a boyfriend, and, after school, her sisters' kids. Children are cared for by mothers. And by grandmothers, sisters, fathers, aunts, brothers, uncles, cousins, grandfathers, neighbors. The people who do the caring do the talking and listening. They give words and show how to use them. First they coo and jab to the baby in the crib and then they name and soon they are calling, teaching, scolding, rhyming, teasing, and making believe. Subjects: Search and Selection Initially, I spent several months establishing a network of contacts in South Baltimore. By frequenting the waiting room of a community health clinic, I met several mothers who allowed me to visit their two-year-olds at home. Other women at the clinic provided the names and addresses of possible subjects. Equipped with these, I took to knocking on doors and, to my surprise, was received, often warmly. I walked in Federal Hill and Riverside Parks, drank coffee at George's Lunch, and inquired at the small corner groceries and the Washing Well. I approached mothers as they shopped on Light Street, or as they watched playing children from stoops along South Charles and Ostend and Henrietta Streets, Battery and Fort Avenues. I was, at least at first, nervous and groping, all too aware of trespassing; they were reserved or shy or openly friendly, curi* The Baltimore Sun, September 11,1977.

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36 Procedures ous, baffled. I asked to call on those who had two-year-olds. Altogether I visited thirteen children in their homes. I met Amy's family through a mutual friend, Roberta McConochie. They had enjoyed participating in Roberta s study of infant development and agreed to become subjects again. Wendy and her mother were on the list that I compiled at the clinic; we met when I showed up, unannounced, on their doorstep. During my wanderings in South Baltimore I struck up a conversation one afternoon with a young woman who, a few days later, stopped me on the street, said that she had a little girl for my study, and escorted me to a nearby kitchen where Beth and her mother were making a cake. Of the thirteen childen whom I visited, Amy, Wendy, and Beth were the first three who met several criteria that I had established in advance. They were healthy, white, firstborn children whose families lived within nine blocks of one another. At the beginning of the study they were starting to combine words and ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-five months. Hearing was normal, and there were no indications of physical or intellectual impairment. One of the mothers worked in a factory, where she earned about $5,000 a year. Two of the mothers received much smaller incomes from Aid to Dependent Children. All of the mothers had lived in South Baltimore for at least five years and spoke the local dialect of nonstandard English. Two had dropped out of high school in the eighth grade; one was a high school graduate. Amy, Wendy, and Beth, then, were selected from among children w h o m I met more or less fortuitously. They were selected so as to be homogeneous with respect to the variables just mentioned: health, language level, sex, race, and birth order of the child; family income and place of residence; dialect and educational level of the major person who cared for the child. Since the children were not chosen randomly in the technical sense, it is possible that the sample is "special," that some unknown factors set these families apart from other similar families. I w a n t to mention three factors that do not distinguish these families. First, the children were not chosen because they spoke particularly clearly and comprehensibly. Second, I did not choose families who were part of a single kinship or social network; the families were unacquainted with one another. Third, I did not choose families because they were interested in participating in a study of language development, while other eligible families were not. In fact, I had no trouble finding interested families, and for some months I continued to visit several of the families whose chil-

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Procedures 37

dren were not chosen to be subjects. These children included a little boy who met all of the criteria except sex of subject and a little girl whose parents earned a higher income than the families of Amy, Wendy, and Beth. Design and Methods The study was ethnographic in approach, observational in method, and longitudinal in design. Naturalistic observations of the children were supplemented by informal interviews with the mothers. PRELIMINARY PERIOD

The study was divided into two phases—a preliminary period, followed by the data collection. During the preliminary period I visited the family on several occasions. This was a necessary prelude to a study that involved subject and researcher in an ongoing, personal relationship. For the sake of the family's privacy and our mutual comfort, we needed to get to know each other. The preliminary visits also helped to prepare the family for the observation sessions, which were video-recorded. I offered information about the study, described the recording equipment, and introduced the person who would occasionally assist in the tapings. This preparation was made in recognition of the fact that an afternoon with a video tape recorder is different from an afternoon without one. The effects of being observed were most apparent in the first taping session. There were signs of mild excitement, selfconsciousness, wariness of the camera. Adults tended to encourage children to talk; children tended to show off and to explore the recording equipment. After one or two sessions the camera seemed to recede into the background, a presence, yes, but more or less taken for granted. There is no way to eliminate the effects of observation. They can be minimized, however, by allowing for the growth of rapport. (See McConochie 1976 for a detailed discussion of the effects of video-recording procedures on the behavior of subjects.) During the preliminary period the mother and I signed an agreement which contained information about the study and provisions for protecting the family's rights to privacy and confidentiality (see Appendix A).4 Such an agreement is particularly important in research of this kind. Extensive observation of individuals in 4

This form is similar to one used by Professor Marvin Harris, Columbia University, in a video study of families.

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38 Procedures their homes and interviews with women about their families pose an obvious threat to privacy. The problem is exacerbated by the use of audio- and video-recording methods which yield highly detailed, permanent records of behavior. The consent form is one way, perhaps the minimal way, of insuring that the families will not be abused. Ethical issues are discussed more fully in Chapter 6. DATA COLLECTION

The core of the study consisted of successive, video-recorded observations spaced at intervals of about three weeks, beginning when the child was starting to combine words and continuing for about eight months. (Appendix B provides a list of the recording equipment.) The taping sessions took place in the child's home as she interacted with her mother and other relatives or friends. Each of the children happened to have a five-year-old playmate who was present for at least one of the taping sessions. The sessions were scheduled at the family's convenience, and recording was confined to the living room. During the course of the study Beth and her mother moved from their apartment into the m o t h e r s parents' home and then back to their apartment. Tapes I, II, XI, and XII were made in the apartment; tapes I I I - X in the grandparents' house. Each session consisted of sixty minutes of continuous recording. The first forty minutes were devoted to recording whatever the child said and did. At the end of this period I introduced four toys—without any direction as to how they should be used—and observation continued for another twenty minutes. (See Appendix C for a description of the toys and an explanation of how they were chosen.) I attempted to hold this order constant across all observation sessions, assuming that initial presentation of the toys would alter the existing situation. However, the toys were introduced earlier if the child requested them—as often happened. The division of each observation session into an "ordinary events" period and a play period was intended to balance two conflicting goals: (1) to achieve the most representative sampling of the conditions under which language learning naturally occurs; (2) to insure some degree of comparability across time and across children. It was necessary in a few cases to supplement these standard taping sessions with additional observations. This was done because the video equipment failed to work (once), the child talked very little owing to fatigue (once), or the child seemed to be advancing at a particularly rapid rate (once). Since Amy spent a lot of time with her grandmother, an additional (unnumbered) session was scheduled in order to observe their interaction.

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Audio-recorded interviews with the child's mother constituted another source of data. A standardized format was rejected in favor of a more casual approach in which the direction of the discussion was determined as much by the mother's interests and problems as by my questions. During the final interview I asked about her views on language development. In addition to yielding information about the child's world, the interviews provided samples of the mother's language and style of speaking. I visited the families for still another purpose—to take photographs of the children. The photographs were given to the families as a gesture of thanks for their participation in the study. In sum, the study consisted of a series of visits to the child's

Table 1. Amy's Schedule Video Sessions Date

Age

I

6/16

18mo/22da

II

7/19

19mo/15da

III

8/9

20mo/5da

IV audio tape a

8/30 9/13

20mo/26da 21mo/9da

V VI

9/21 10/11

21mo/17da 22mo/7da

Sample

VIP Grandmother VIII

11/6 11/21 11/22

23mo/2da 23mo/17da 23mo/18da

IX X XI

12/20 1/31 3/13

24mo/16da 25mo/18da 27mo/9da

Interviews Session Date

Marlene I

Marlene II

Photography Sessions Session Date I

7/12

II

8/15

III

9/21

IV

10/31

V

1 0 /i 1 LZf l J

VI VII

3/27 6/19

7/26

9/18

Marlene III 11/5

Marlene IV 7/17

Note: Preliminary visits—6/6, 6/10, 6/13. a Audio tape—supplementary data during a period of rapid development. b Session VII was originally scheduled for 11/1, but that tape turned out to be unusable owing to a technical problem.

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40

Procedures

home during the time that she learned to combine words. The initial visits comprised the "getting acquainted" phase of the study. These were followed by a succession of visits of three types: videorecorded, naturalistic observation sessions; informal interviews with the child's mother; and photography sessions. Presented in Tables 1,2, and 3 are the schedules for the three children. Description The value of an observational study lies in its descriptive power. Description can take many forms, including portrait, transcript, and analysis. These three forms of description vary along a continuum from most qualitative (portrait) to most quantitative (anal-

Table 2. Wendy's Schedule Video Sessions Date Age Sample I

1/10

23mo/29da

II

1/31

24mo/20da

III

2/26

25mo/15da

IV

3/13

26mo/2da

V VI VII

4/5 4/24 5/15

26mo/22da 27mo/13da 28mo/4da

VIII IX

6/5 6/26

28mo/24da 29mo/15da

X XI

8/4 9/1

30mo/23da 31mo/20da

XII

9/22

32mo/llda

Interviews Date Session

Liz I

Photography Sessions Session Date I

1/11

II

3/6

III

4/5

IV

6/3

V

7/5

VI

8/11

2/6

Liz II

3/29

Liz IIIA Liz IIIB a

5/25 6/3

Liz IV

7/14

LizV

9/18

Note: Preliminary visits—10/14,10/31,12/2,12/20, 1/7. a Liz IIIB scheduled because part of Liz IIIA was undecipherable owing to technical problems.

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ysis). A portrait is a likeness of a person or a family, a rendering of the concrete and the significant. A transcript is a painstaking and highly conventionalized record of behavior. Preserved in the transcript are the kinds of information that are categorized and counted for the analyses. In this study, the portraits were intended to balance the more quantitative forms of description, to ground them in the texture and detail of real lives. PORTRAITS

In writing a portrait of each child I drew on all the "data"—the video tapes, the interviews with the mothers, the notes that I kept throughout the study, my memory. I tried to distill words and images from the child's world, to leave traces of her meanings. Because the mother was central to that world, the portrait is hers as

Table 3. Beth's Schedule Video Sessions Sample Date Age I

10/12

25mo/9da

IP III

10/26 10/28 11/7

25mo/23da 25mo/25da 26mo/4da

IV

11/29

26mo/26da

V

12/18

27mo/15da

VI

1/10

28mo/7da

VII VIII IX

1/26 2/18 3/10

28mo/23da 29mo/15da 30mo/7da

X XI

3/31 4/20

30mo/28da 31mo/17da

XII

5/12

32mo/9da

Interviews Date Session

Nora I

I

10/18

II

12/3

III

1/26

IV

3/24

V

4/28

11/16

Nora II

1/4

Nora III

1/22

Nora IV

3/24

Nora V

Photography Sessions Session Date

6/1

Note: Preliminary visits—7/16, 7/28, 8/19,10/6,10/7, 10/11. a Because Beth talked relatively little on 10/26, a second (twenty-minute) session was scheduled for 10/28. These two subsamples were combined to form sample II.

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42 Procedures well. Here Marlene, Liz> and Nora speak at length. I chose and ordered the passages with an eye to what seemed significant to them —an experience related time and again, beliefs expressed with conviction or uncertainty, matters routine and taken for granted. I quoted verbatim from the mothers to convey the flavor of the spoken language and of their individual styles of expression. Each mother—because of her unique temperament, interests, abilities, and experiences—illuminated different facets of life in South Baltimore. Collectively, the three portraits form a portrait, however partial, of a community. TRANSCRIPTS

Anyone who has lived or worked with two-year-olds knows that they can present a challenge to the listener. A stranger is likely to have a particularly hard time deciphering child speech. A stranger who is unfamiliar with the child's dialect is even more seriously handicapped. Friends and relatives stand a much better chance of understanding a child's words, even though they may not succeed in every instance. In view of these considerations, child speech was transcribed by people who knew the child. A lengthy, painstaking process of construction and revision was required in order to achieve an accurate, reliable transcript. I made a transcript as soon as possible after each video taping session. A member of the child's family m a d e a separate transcript of each tape at the end of the study. I later used these two "drafts" as the basis for a final transcript, in some cases seeking further help from the families. In other words, the final child speech transcript was the result of a collaboration with the families. We brought essential, complementary skills to this joint undertaking. Mothers and fathers, aunts and cousins are uniquely qualified to transcribe child speech by virtue of their position as insiders. They are part of the communicative network in which the child is embedded. They decipher her messages on a daily basis. When Amy demanded, "Get a ban-ban," her Uncle Bruce figured out what she wanted and decided whether to comply. This required that he attend to the highly information-laden words, recognize idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, and survey the situation for clues to her meaning. As a participant-observer, I tried to see the families from their perspective. I entered their homes periodically and eventually developed relationships with children and adults. Nevertheless, I remained a visitor, an outsider. My qualifications as transcriber were

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different and included an awareness of certain issues in the study of language development and previous experience in transcribing child speech. I was sensitive to the small, "nonessential" units of language—plural and possessive -s, -ing, contractions, pronouns. Did she say "I'm goin" or was it "I goin"? But I lacked the ease of understanding of Beth s mother, Wendy's grandmother, and Amy's Aunt Karen. The record of child speech is the most important part of the video transcript. Also included was a record of what other people said during the taping session. Compared with young children, adults were much easier to understand. Still, some were fast and fluent, and there were storytellers among them and bellowers, excited talkers and soft-spoken ones. With patience, most of their words could be committed to paper, though much else was lost: the sounds of the words in the dialect, the rhythm, the shadings of emotion. Complementing the record of speech is a running description of what people did as they talked or kept silent. The child's behavior was described in detail: her actions, gestures, facial expressions, and the direction of her gaze. A less comprehensive description was made of the nonverbal behaviors of those who interacted with her. Appendix D provides a step-by-step chronicle of the procedures used in making the transcript. The complete video transcript resembles a huge ledger, running to sixty pages for a one-hour tape, and with separate columns for each of the accounts: on the far left the child's nonverbal behaviors, then her words, other people's words, and on the far right, their behaviors. Scanning from top to bottom of the page, one sees how the entries are temporally related. Conversations take shape. Commentaries emerge. Amidst these big, unwieldy records, patterns of language learning were sought. ANALYSES

Transcription of the video tapes represents one level of description, the translation from sound and picture into words. The analysis of data involves description on a more abstract level, using the transcript as data. Two analyses were conducted, each based on the first eight video tapes from each child. Before discussing the analyses, it is necessary to consider the general characteristics of the speech samples. These are presented in Table 4 and include the total number of utterances which the

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44 Procedures Table 4. General Description of Speech Samples

Child

Sample

Age (Months, Days)

Total Number of Utterances

Unintelligible Utterances (Proportions)

MLU

Amy

I II III IV V VI VII VIII

18,22 19,15 20,05 20,26 21,17 22,07 23,02 23,18

390 414 653 525 515 609 605 679

.07 .06 .08 .08 .04 .07 .06 .09

1.5 1.5 1.6 1.5 1.5 2.2 1.6 2.4

Wendy

I II III IV V VI VII VIII

23,29 24,20 25,15 26,02 26,22 27,13 28,04 28,24

757 635 769 625 580 357 375 635

.11 .15 .11 .17 .10 .14 .09 .07

1.6 1.6 1.6 2.1 1.5 2.0 2.0 2.1

Beth

I II III IV V VI VII VIII

25,09 25,23 26,04 26,26 27,15 28,07 28,23 29,15

625 584 387 620 292 544 403 529

.08 .09 .13 .09 .11 .09 .12 .09

2.2 1.9 1.8 2.2 2.0 2.1 2.4 2.5

child produced during each sample, the proportion of unintelligible utterances, and the mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU). The samples were generally quite large. In the majority the children produced at least five hundred utterances. Only one sample (Beth II) fell considerably below three hundred utterances. Note that the figure given for Beth II includes utterances from a supplementary twenty-minute taping session. This session was scheduled because of the low frequency of child speech during the original session when Beth was tired and cranky from a cold. Situational differences also seemed to have an important effect on the amount of speech. For example, Beth talked relatively little during samples III and V, when her five-year-old cousin Lori was present.

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Procedures 45 Wendy talked least in sample VI, when she and Liz played catch. Also computed were the proportions of utterances which were unintelligible. Thanks to the families' help, these figures are low. In sixteen of the twenty-four samples the rate of unintelligibility was .10 or lower. Wendy was consistently hardest to understand, mainly because her speech was highly expressive. Mean length of utterance, calculated according to the rules presented by Bloom (1970), is the final s u m m a r y measure. Measures of MLU are widely used to establish that children of varying chronological ages are at roughly comparable points in language development. In the first sample Amy and Wendy had similar MLU s of 1.5 and 1.6, respectively, whereas Beth's was 2.2. The MLU s of all three children gradually increased across the samples, but there was considerable fluctuation, owing perhaps to the small (three-week) intervals between samples and to situational variation across samples. By the final sample Amy and Beth had MLU's of 2.4 and 2.5, respectively, while Wendy's was only 2.1. However, MLU underestimates the language level of children like Wendy who intersperse their long utterances with frequent no's and huh | s. (See Lightbown 1977 for a critique of MLU as an index of language development.) In sum, the analyses were based on the first eight video tapes from each child. Each of these hour-long samples contained several hundred child utterances. The great majority of these utterances were intelligible and, therefore, could be analyzed. Although there was variation across children in MLU, all samples fell within a range of 1.5-2.5 morphemes. Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking. The first analysis dealt with interactions in which the child received direct instruction in language and speaking. In an interaction of this sort the more mature speaker (usually the mother) was cast in the role of teacher, the young child in the role of pupil. The children were taught a variety of "lessons," including how to n a m e and how to respond appropriately in conversation. For this analysis I did not have a ready-made set of categories. I started with some insights that the mothers had and some casual impressions of my own. By reviewing the transcripts I tried to identify instances of direct instruction and to see whether they clustered into subcategories. I began with vague definitions and gradually refined them. The description that eventually emerged was the result of repeated passes through the transcripts, repeated revisions of tentative categories. In other words, this analysis involved derived categories of behav-

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46 Procedures ior, as described by Beer (1973), Bloom (1974), and Sankoff (1974). Combining Words to Express Meanings. The second analysis focused on the meanings that Amy, Wendy, and Beth encoded in their early word combinations. In recent years several students of child language have explored the kinds of meanings or relationships that young children are able to express by combining words. In this type of analysis the researcher infers the meaning of what a young child says by examining the contexts in which the sentence occurred. For example, it is assumed that a child who says "Rock baby" while rocking a doll is talking about an action (rocking) upon an object (doll). This act of inference is not so different from what the families in the study did routinely, informally, unselfconsciously in trying to understand what the child meant: they paid attention not only to what she said but to what she was doing or anticipating, w h o m she was addressing, which object had just captured her interest. In their work with middle-class children, Bloom and her colleagues (Bloom, Hood, and Lightbown 1974; Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975) found that the children combined words to express such basic notions as the existence of an object ("that cup"), the disappearance of an object ("no truck"), an action by an agent ("I eat"), the movement of an object to a new location ("put cup there"), and an inner state ("want ninny"). They identified a set of categories—including Existence, Negation, Action, Locative Action, State —that described these relations. In a replication of this work Lightbown (1977) found that Blooms categories (called categories of "semantic/syntactic relations") accounted for the data from two French-speaking children from Canada. These categories provided a hypothesis for the present study: I expected that they would adequately describe the relationships that Amy, Wendy, and Beth expressed in their sentences. I also hypothesized that the sequence of development of these meanings would resemble the sequence discovered by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood and confirmed by Lightbown. This analysis, then, contrasts with the first analysis in taking its initial descriptive strategy from previous studies. So far I have given a brief overview of the procedures used in this analysis. In the following paragraphs the procedures are described in more detail for the reader who has a specialized interest in this topic. The procedures conformed as closely as possible to those set forth by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood and by Lightbown. Each multi-word utterance was examined to determine the relationship between the words in the utterance and the relationship between the utterance and the nonlinguistic context. On the basis

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47

of these two kinds of information, the utterance was assigned to a category of semantic/syntactic relations. These categories are listed in Table 5, along with brief definitions of the major categories. (Appendix E provides definitions and examples for all of the categories.) Also depicted here are the groupings within the major categories. The categories of Existence, Negation, and Recurrence comprise the group of functional relations: utterances in these categories include function words that have the same meaning across many different contexts. The group of verb relations includes seven categories: Action, Locative Action, Residual Action, Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention. The verb relations are further divided into action relations (Action, Locative Action, Residual Action) and state relations (Locative State, State, Notice). Three of the categories were modified slightly. The category of Negation was redefined to include utterances that did not include a negative marker but clearly referred to the nonexistence or disappearance of a person or object. All three children produced utterances of this type during the early samples, often as they searched for a missing object. The Notice category was expanded to include a small group of Amy s utterances in which the notice verb was not expressed. These utterances could be assigned to the Notice category on the basis of Amy's accompanying nonverbal behavior. In addition, a group of utterances was identified which could not be unequivocally assigned to the Action category rather than the Locative Action category. These utterances which included the verb ride were produced occasionally by Beth, rarely by Amy or Wendy. The difficulty arose in determining which movement the child referred to: the locative action of placing the doll into the truck or the immediately following action of pushing the truck back and forth.5 These utterances were kept separate in a category called Residual Action. None of these revisions altered the substance of the original definition. Rather, they are refinements made possible by the greater precision of video-recorded data, compared with audiorecorded data. Collectively, these three alterations accounted for a very small number of the multi-word relations expressed by the three children. In order to test the reliability with which utterances could be 5

The following is another example: Beth climbed onto a stationary bicycle and sat shaking the handlebars, saying all the while, "I ride bike." Was she referring to the locative action of climbing onto the bike or to the pretend action of riding?

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Procedures

Table 5. Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Relations Major categories Functional

Existence Negation

Recurrence Verb

Action Locative Action Residual Action Locative State State Notice Intention

Other

Possession Attribution

Pointing out or naming an object or person Reference to the nonexistence, disappearance, or rejection of an object or event; also prohibition, denial Reference to another instance of an object or event Reference to a movement whose goal is other than a change in the location of an object or person Reference to a movement whose goal is a change in the location of an object or person Utterance that could not be unequivocally assigned to Action rather than Locative Action Reference to the location of an object or person, no movement involved Reference to an internal or external state Reference to attention to a person, object, or event Reference to a future event, involves matrix verb and main verb Reference to a relationship between an object and the person to whom it belongs Reference to a characterization of an object or person

Minor categories Wh-Question Place Vocative Performative Stereotype Rhyme/Routine Other 3 Equivocal/Undetermined Note: See Appendix E for examples from each category. a Other includes: Greeting, Affirmation, Time, Manner, Dative, Instrument, Conjunction, Causality, and Identity.

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Table 6. Inter-Coder Reliabilities of Semantic/ Syntactic Categories Proportion of Agreement

Child

Sample

Amy

I V VIII

.91 .81 .94

Wendy

I V VIII

.88 .86 .93

Beth

I V VIII

.88 .86 .90

a

Each figure is based on fifty utterances and represents the extent of agreement between the independent judgments of two coders.

assigned to categories, comparisons were made between the individual judgments of two coders. I categorized fifty consecutive utterances from each of three samples (I, V, VIII) for each child. A trained assistant, working independently, categorized the same utterances. The proportions of agreement were then calculated. These proportions, presented in Table 6, ranged from .81 to .94, indicating a high level of inter-coder reliability. After all of the multi-word relations had been categorized, tallies were made of the number of relations per category. Only utterance types were included. That is, a relation in a particular utterance was counted only once regardless of how many times the child repeated the utterance in a given sample. 6 For example, Beth said "I play" four times (four tokens) in the third sample but received credit for only one Action relation (one type). As the children advanced linguistically, they began to express more than one relation per sentence. In the final sample, for example, Wendy said "I wanna give 'em Tommy" and was credited with three relations— Occasionally, a child used the same form to express two different relations. For example, "baby truck" would be categorized as either Possession or Locative Action, depending on whether the child referred to a truck that belonged to the baby or commented as she placed the baby into the truck. In such cases each utterance was counted as a different relational type.

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50 Procedures

Intention, Action, and Dative. In other words, this single utterance added three relational types to the total number of relational types found in Wendy VIII. In addition to absolute frequencies I also computed the proportions of all relations per sample that fell into each category. The frequency distributions provided evidence relevant to both hypotheses—that the categories would account for the data and that the sequence of development of semantic/syntactic relations would be similar to the sequence identified by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977).

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3

The Children and Their Families Amy Amy, at eighteen months, was fascinated by ice and soda and cups. She picked up her cup from the coffee table and poured some soda into mommy's. Then poured from mommy's back into hers. Took a drink. Repeated the sequence. Repeated it again. She offered her soda to mommy and told her, "Drink." She held one cup in each hand and carefully, silently poured from one to the other. She fished out a piece of ice and put it into her mouth. Spit it into her palm and inspected it. Dropped it back into her cup. Fished it out again. Put it into mommy's cup. She offered mommy another drink. She tugged on mommy's wrist and poured the remaining ice into her cupped hands. Marlene shook her head and smiled, "All these wonderful little games you have to play." Later, Amy's interest shifted to the chips that Marlene served. She distributed them one at a time. "Here mommy." "Here Peggy." "Here Terry." She gave her baby a bite. She held out a chip to Kris. When Kris reached for it, Amy laughed and ate it herself. During the week Amy spent part of each day with Kris because their grandmother babysat for them. Kris was older. She went to kindergarten. Sometimes she tried to teach Amy words. She picked up a stuffed dog and said, "What is it?" Amy: "Doggie." Kris: "Yeah, doggie." Kris holds up the elephant. "What's this?" Amy: "Doggie." "What?" "Baby." "No." Kris tries some prompts. She thrusts her face into Amy's and enunciates loudly, "Uh—. Uh—." Amy: "Pig." Kris tries again, "Uh—." Finally, losing patience, she surrenders the whole word and Amy repeats it, "Elephant." Kris holds up the small bunny. "What's this?" Amy: "Baby." Kris: "Bunny. You don't know no thin. You say all baby." Amy had a large assortment of animals. The smaller ones formed a row across the back of the sofa and shook when she jumped on the cushions. The big ones endured a lot of hugging and romping—the well-worn, one-eyed teddy and the blow-up tiger from the city fair. Amy always called the tiger "my turkey," and somebody,

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52 The Children and Their Families Karen or Bruce or Michael, would say, "That ain't no turkey! It's a tiger." The pink rabbit was big and squat enough to ride. Kris supplied the locomotion. She dragged it across the floor while Amy held on to the neck, squealing. Kris yanked it backward by the tail and Amy slipped off. She remounted and said, "Giddee up." Amy h a d several other friends about Kris' age. She leaned out the door and called to them, "Tom-my. Geor-gie." She stuck out her foot and pointed to the doggie's head on her new bedroom slipper. "Look. See doggie?" Tommy, Georgie, and the others came to Amy's birthday party. She had one every year. For her second birthday the cake was white, trimmed in pink and green, bedecked by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ten children in party hats spooned ice cream and tooted whistles. Marlene took pictures. Amy beamed. It was like a second Christmas: she got dolls, stuffed animals, clothing, money. She took a special liking to a Raggedy Ann and a Mickey Mouse that talked. By the time Amy was two she could recite her complete n a m e and address without any prompting. "What's your name? Where do you live?" was one of the ritualized instructions that Marlene gave. She also taught Amy to do "Pattycake," "This little piggy went to market," "Caught me a bear," and "The eensy teensy spider." These rhymes and routines were part of the family's repertoire of games for young children. Another one involved body parts. "Where's your h a i r ? " Mollie, her grandmother, would say, and Amy would point to it. Where's your ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, belly, hiney? Then there were the members of the family to locate. Mollie: "Where's Marlene? Huh? Where's m o m m y ? " Amy: "Hers workin." "Where's Wesley?" "Gone." "Gone to work. Where's Bruce?" "In school." "Where's Karen?" They continued until they had accounted for everyone. Amy and Mollie played catch with a frisbee that, now and then, glanced off Amy's nose or chin. Each time she went to Mom for a kiss to the injured part. When the frisbee bounced off Mom's arm, Amy expressed her sympathy, "Ooh, I kiss." Amy got her share of real bruises and bumps, the sort of thing that any athlete risks. She was graceful, agile, propelled by exuberance. She spun through the living room, laughing, dropped to a sitting position, raised her legs, and pivoted on her rear end. She raised her feet over her head and pawed the air. She barrelled out to the dining room and back to Marlene. Threw her arms around her and crowed, "My mommy!" She dived like an airplane. She

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The Children and Their Families 53 growled and lumbered down the hallway where the boogeyman lurked, sped back on all fours, palms smacking the linoleum. She practiced her acrobatic skills. She tried a forward roll but fell to one side. She tried to do jumping-jacks like Kris, jumping with legs apart, knees bent, swinging her arms and clapping erratically. Judy told her to shake her hiney. She shook it. She did a perfect forward roll. Judy laughed and Marlene said, "You did it!" Sometimes Amy and Marlene pretended to fight. When Amy tried to take her cup, Marlene pushed her away, "Y' w a n n a fight? Huh? You re gonna get punched right in the gut." Amy smiled and put u p her dukes, circled menacingly. Threw a fist at Marlene. Sometimes Amy provoked the confrontations with a "Shut up punk" or "Punch you face." Amy liked to wear her hair in pigtails. She squeezed her eyes shut as Marlene pulled the soft, dark wisps through the rubber bands. Amy fingered the pigtails admiringly. She tried to put a rubber b a n d in her baby's hair. Some days the babies (dolls and small, stuffed animals) needed a lot of attention—feeding, burping, rocking. She comforted a baby. "Aw. Don't cry." She put the baby into Marlene s a r m s and then into K a r e n s . She pointed out the baby's eyes, nose, ears, hands. She tickled its feet, bit its fingers. She washed its face, shampooed its hair, rubbed powder on its belly. She changed her babies, trained them to use the potty chair. She said, "That baby poop. Go get a Pamper." She leaves the room and returns with a fresh Pamper. She takes the baby by the arm, pokes her finger into its belly and says, "Did you poop?" Looks up at Marlene and laughs. She lays the baby on the Pamper. Pokes it again. "Did you? Did you?" Judy giggles. Amy gives the baby to mommy. "Go to the pot. Baby go to the pot." Marlene: "Oh, OK. Get your pot. Get it. I'll hold it. Get the baby's potty." Amy drags the potty chair to Marlene. Sits the baby on the edge. She waits a little while, then peers into the pot. "See poop. I see it. See it. Ah, I see it." She screws up her face in distaste. Laughs. "I see." She removes the pot from the potty chair and dumps out its contents. Announces, "Baby done." "She was born seven minutes of two Tuesday afternoon. But I went into labor at, well, I guess my pains started about 9:00 Monday night. But I went to bed. See, because it just felt like a backache. And I started gettin twinges every once in a while. But sometimes she used to lay on my muscles. And I'd get pains like that.

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54 The Children and Their Families

And once before I went to the doctor s and they said it was false labor, you know. So I figured that night, you know, it ain't nothin. It's just, you know, she's layin on my muscles. And about, oh, I guess about 11:301 woke up and, boy, every minute they were hittin me. And I said, 'This is it, I know.' But I didn't wake my mother up till 1:00 to tell her cause I wanted to be sure. She said, 'Why the hell didn't you tell me sooner?' I said, 'Cause I wanted to make sure. At the hospital Marlene had a hard time convincing the doctor that she was in labor. "About the only thing that I really complained about was that doctor tellin me that I wasn't in labor and here I'm the one goin through the thing. And I said to him, 'Look, I oughta know.'" Eventually he ordered X-rays and rushed her to the operating room for a Caesarean. "I watched her bein born. They pulled her out and all I could see was the rear end and the black hair and I kept sayin, 'What is it? Turn it around. I wanna see it,' you know." Marlene recalled a conversation with the Caesarean specialist right before the delivery. "He said, 'I know what you're lookin for.' I said, 'Yeah?' He said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'It's a little girl.' I said, 'You sure?' He said, 'Yes, I wouldn't lie to you.' So he felt my stomach and he said, 'It's a little girl.' When they delivered her, the nurse turned around and she said, 'Oh, you got a little black-headed girl.' He said, 'See, I didn't disappoint you, did I?'" The story of Amy's birth was added to the family's collection. These stories were told often, with relish, humor, and graphic detail. Marlene s mother, Mollie, had borne seven children. At baby showers she started with Ralph and went right on through Norma, Marlene, Michael, Bruce, Karen, and Judy. Norma told about Kris' birth. Marlene got out the picture album and showed the photo of herself, not yet five months gone but looking like she was about to deliver. "I'm tellin you, I was huge. Had a start wearin maternity clothes when I was two months . . . I could put two grocery bags on my stomach when I finally went into the ninth month with her . . . And I went up to like a 44 in a bra. The straps were cuttin into my shoulders and my bust was so huge, I was bent backwards trying to hold myself up. And people would just look at me and start laughin. My brother-in-law said to me, 'My God,' he says, 'Where are you carryin that baby at, your belly or your bust? You're terrible lookin.'" Marlene was eighteen years old when Amy was born. She had worked for a while as a waitress in an all-night restaurant downtown. When Amy was six months old, she got a job through a wel-

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The Children and Their Families 55 fare program called WIN. "She [the social worker] said, 'You're entitled not to go to work if you don't want to because your child's under six years of age.' I said, 'No.' I said, 'I'll go to work.' Because I figured like this. As long as I was able to get up and go to work, I was gonna go. Because there's a lot of people out there that can't work that deserve the money more than I do." Marlene was lucky to get a job only a few blocks from home. She operated a machine that assembled cardboard cartons. At the time of the study she m a d e $2.15 an hour and got one week's paid vacation. Occasionally she saw Mr. Meyers, owner of the factory. "Like the other day he come in there and he had the nicest tan. And he said, 'Morning Marlene.' I said, 'Morning.' I said, 'You got a nice tan, Mr. Meyers.' He said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'What, you been layin out in the back y a r d ? ' cause the m a n had been gone three weeks, right? Said, 'No. I just got back from Miami Beach, Florida.' I said, 'Oh.' 'Yes, I been out there layin in the sun with the palm trees.' 'Mm h m . And we got our d a m n asses up here slavin to keep you under them p a l m trees too.' He got to laughin. He said, 'Watch it there.'" While Marlene worked, her mother took care of Amy. Amy had several other companions right there at home: Judy, 8; Karen, 13; Bruce, 14; and Michael, 18. Nearest in age to Amy was her cousin Kris, 5. Norma brought her by in the morning and picked her u p after work. Jealousies were directed downward to the younger: "Judy's jealous of Kris. And Krissie s jealous of Amy." The household also included Wesley and Mollies boyfriend, Russell. Marlene and Wesley had started going together when Amy was a few months old. For a while they talked about getting married. Mollie and Wesley got into arguments. She felt that he h a d no right to yell at Amy. The family lived in a three-story rowhouse that Mollie rented. The video tapes were made in the living room. All of the females m a d e occasional appearances on tape, though Amy and Marlene were clearly the main characters. The males kept their distance. Even Bruce. After the study he and Karen transcribed Amy's speech. They spent their earnings up on Light Street, and by September they h a d finished their Christmas shopping. Bruce was the student of the family. "He brought his [report card] in and he's got E s in everything. In his conduct, work habits, and his courses. His teacher wrote on the back that it's sure a delight to have Bruce in her class because he's an outstanding student." He wrote poetry and plays which the kids in the neighborhood performed. Marlene thought that he would be the first in the family to finish high school.

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56 The Children and Their Families

Marlene quit school in the eighth grade. She recalled the boredom and the English teacher. "The English teacher would come in and she's supposed to be teachin you how to speak proper English, right? Now she would come in and say, 'How many of you ain't got no book?' you know. Now what kind of English is that?" Marlene said that Amy was even closer to Bruce than to her. "I mean like if she gets hurt or somethin, she'll come to me. But like when Wesley would agitate her and stuff like that, she'd break away, she'd go to Bruce. She'd cry for Bruce. And if she wakes up during the night and goes to the bathroom or something, she won't come back to bed. She goes and crawls in with Bruce." Marlene felt that Amy was especially close to Bruce because he was around her more than some of the other members of the family. Karen played with Amy and occasionally took her for walks, but she also went out a lot with her girlfriend. Bruce stayed at home, reading or listening to records. And if the kids were playing school, Bruce would let Amy play. For a while Amy was very possessive of anything related to Wesley, his cigarettes, matches, pillow. Didn't want anyone to touch them. One night when he was working, she climbed onto his side of the bed. "I said, 'Hey, what do you think you're doin?' She said, 'This is my daddy's bed. You get out.' Yeah! Wanted me to get out! I said, 'I ain't goin. I'm layin here.' Well, she had to sleep on his side of the bed and I had to stay on mine." Marlene believed that children learn to talk by listening to everyone around them. She believed in the importance of talking to children, in the beneficial effects of early exposure to speech. "That's like they said that when you have your baby they've noticed when they run a survey and tests on these kids that children that's had their parents talk to em even when they were little, when they were first born, like, Isn't it a pretty baby?' and all this, they grow up, they learn to talk a lot faster and they're more apt to adopt a higher IQ than ones that they just leave em lay all the time and they don't really start talkin to em until they start say in words." Marlene felt that Amy learned more about language from her sisters and brothers and her mother, less from her because she had worked since Amy was a baby. She thought that Amy also learned from the neighbors. Marlene believed that some people make better models than others for a young child. "Well, it all depends on what kind of person it is. Like if you're gonna be livin around somebody who's got kids that are real foul-mouthed and everything, I don't think it's a good atmosphere for a little one who's just learnin how to talk to grow up around because they're gonna pick it up not

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The Children and Their Families 57 realizin it's wrong. But if you get around some people that just, you know, pat em on the head, 'Hello,' you know/it's a lot better I think for em. Because, well, with somebody like that they learn to respect other people when they get old." When Amy said b a d words, Marlene tried not to get too excited. "We mostly just ignore her, you know, try not to laugh at her and make her think that she's bein funny by doin it. Usually that seems to work pretty well when we do that. She'll say to me, 'Did you hear what I said?' and she'll laugh. You know, we just sit and ignore it and then she doesn't do it any more. But now if somebody cusses around here, she'll go, 'Ooooh, you're cussin. That's bad.'" Marlene was also concerned that Amy pronounce her words correctly. "If she can't pronounce a long word or something, try to get her, like when she used to say 'truck,' it would come out 'fuck,' you know. So I would sit her down and I would, you know, make the sounds with her. Like I say, 'You don't say f, you say tr! And so finally she finally got it through her head to put the tr instead of the f, you know. And like children's names. Like instead of saying 'Steven/ it would be 'Teven,' you know. Things like that, you know. Make her pronounce her vowels and things a little bit better." Marlene traced Amy's development during the course of the study. She noticed that Amy grew more active, independent, and verbally assertive. "She's a lot more big mouth. Got a real smartness to her, you know. Gotta get real flip . . . Everything the kids do, she's gotta be a copycat and do it too, you know. Judy and them get out here dancin, she's gotta do it. And they got her now where she does the b u m p . Mmmm m m . She really thinks she's comical. Like she used to eat with a spoon. Now that everybody else eats with a fork, she wants to eat with a fork too. Gotta cut her own food. Yeah, wants to be little miss independent, if you know what I mean." Amy also began to look forward to venturing out beyond the stoop. "Like now she's talkin about when she gets bigger how she'll be able to go to school and walk across the street by herself and go to the store for me. That's all she's talkin about when she gets bigger, she's goin to school, like Judy and Krissie." Marlene hoped that by the time Amy grows up things will be better. "Like maybe the prices'11 be goin down by then. And there won't be a whole lot of fightin and gang fights and people shootin and killin each other. And it'll just be a lot more peaceable place to live in. And then, of course, every mother dreams of her child growin up, marrying the, you know, dignified man, having all these little grandchildren runnin around. I guess I'd really like for her to finish school. Maybe by the time she gets to my age, you know, by

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58 The Children and Their Families that time she'll be old enough to make her own decisions and I really won't, you know, try to make her mind up for her. I'll just, you know, let her do what she wants. Cause by that time she liable to be married herself." Marlene predicted that Amy would have no trouble adjusting to school because she got along well with the neighborhood kids. "She gets candy, you know, she'll tear pieces off and give each one of em some, but a lot of em around here, she won't do it because they don't do it with her. They'll bring candy out, you know, and all the kids will be sittin around. They'll just sit there and eat in front of em, you know. I don't know how they can do it. And the mothers they just, they're just the same way. They just don't say to the kids, well, you know, 'That's not nice. Give em all some.'" Marlene returned again and again to the topic of sharing. She placed a high value on sharing and was proud when Amy showed that she was learning to share. Amy often played outside with Sammy, a little boy who lived a few doors away. Sammy's mother, Carol Lee, used to p u t Amy into the big stroller with S a m m y and take them up to the park while Marlene was working. Carol Lee often bought candy and ice cream and soda for Amy. "So the other night when we went down [shopping], she [Amy] asked if she could have a [toy] lawnmower. And I said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Now you got the chair and you're gonna get a lawnmower and that's all you're gettin. Don't ask for nothin else.' Because the chair was seven and the lawnmower was three. So I got her the lawnmower. She says, 'Well, can I buy S a m m y one?' So I said, 'Yeah, OK.' So we got S a m m y a lawnmower. I bought him the blue. We got her the yellow." Marlene felt that it was natural for a child Amy's age to get into squabbles with other children, and she tried not to intervene. "They get out there and they punch and pull each other's hair and stuff like that. Well, she's gonna have to learn to take up for herself sometime. But if it gets to the point where there's gonna be bloodshed or somethin, then I'm gonna stop it. But as long as it's just a push and shove and back and forth, you know, it really doesn't worry me too much." Sometimes another child tried to take advantage of Amy. For example, one of her playmates was in the habit of taking her toys. Marlene gave Amy detailed instructions about how to handle the situation. "So I told her, I said, 'Well, when he comes in and takes em you tell him that he can play with em, but he's gotta leave some here for you to play with. If he doesn't w a n n a do that then you just tell him your m o m m y says that they can't play with the toys a n d that's it.' So I said, 'If he hits you or anything, you hit him

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The Children and Their Families 59 back.' I said, 'But you don't hit unless they hit first.' So she does pretty good with that, you know." Marlene and Amy lived along a major street where traffic posed a danger to children. Marlene got m a d when some of the neighborhood kids told Amy to retrieve a ball that bounced into the street. "So I told my neighbors if I'm workin and Mom's doin cleanin or somethin, if they see her out there and she even so much as starts to put her foot on the street, to paddle her ass." Soon after, Miss Bertha saw Amy take off after a ball. She grabbed her and paddled her ass. Wendy For several weeks, around the time of her second birthday, Wendy preferred the soft cloth doll with the broad, plastic face, a face almost as large as her own, with huge, wide-open eyes. The two set off one morning on a merry trip, baby in the stroller, Wendy pushing, singing the high, sweet notes, "Baby baby baby baby baby." They get almost as far as the kitchen. Wendy sways, shifts from one foot to the other, begins to chant in dark, ominous tones, "No na na. No na na." She seizes her baby by the ear. Looks straight into her eyes and shakes her. Pauses. Shakes. Pauses. "No na na. No na na." Across the room they go, eye to eye, caught in the quickening, deepening rhythms of the chant. Shaking the baby, shaking. Bonnet flapping, faster, faster, "No na na No na na No nana/Vonana /" The crescendo breaks into a single sharp syllable. Wendy hurls the baby over her head. Immediately, she turns, picks up the baby, and clasps her in a long, loving embrace. Wendy starred in secret d r a m a s of secret delights, secret injuries, secret silences, long, secret soliloquies. "My m o m m y says, 'Wait a minute.' Her go, 'Mm 3 me.' Mommy. M m m . Mommy say, 'hair.' Uh. Uh. Hair? Say, 'hair.'" One of the reasons Wendy's sentences were hard to understand was that she set them to music with squeals and shrieks, grumblings, throaty trills, waitings, novel accents, rising rhythms and syncopated r h y t h m s . She was a virtuoso of mood. She h u m m e d wordlessly. Invented melodies. Her laughter tinkled, crumbled, spiraled, burst forth in rapid, high-pitched barks. She left a trail of "ohs," "ahs," and "yuks." Wendy h a d an ease with people, a natural, social poise. She took quickly to the laps of babysitters, strangers. She proffered an

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60 The Children and Their Families impulsive hug to a new little playmate and said, "Nice baby." She insisted that I abandon my camera to play with her. She responded with evident delight to the large group of people who shouted "Happy Birthday" when she and Mamom arrived at her second birthday party. Her affections were as open, unguarded as her exaltations, furies, desolations. She turned the full force of emotion upon you. Besides the cloth doll she had several others. She fed them, combed and recombed their hair, rocked and cuddled them, bounced them on her knee. She danced with them to the music from the jukebox next door, to TV commercials, to her own songs. They danced cheek to cheek, swaying gently. They held hands and swung their hips. She piled her babies, her blanket, her monkey, Freddie Flintstone, and Barney into the recliner and settled in with them, ninny (pacifier) in mouth, pretending to sleep. For a time, after the blanket and cloth doll had waned in importance, the monkey was her favorite. He was a weightless, limber creature, good for spinning and shaking. She carried him carelessly by tail or leg. He rode with her on her motorcycle, slumped over the handlebars. Knobs and buttons tempted her, offering themselves for prolonged inspection and manipulation. She made a series of studies of her radio music box, the TV, my tape recorder. She returned again and again to the headphones that Steve kept under his stereo. She jingled the cord, traced and retraced the inside of the ear pads, asked m o m m y to help her put them on. She threaded my plastic donuts onto the stick, took them off, re threaded them, took them off again. Wendy occasionally played with Joy, a five-year-old neighbor. During the seventh taping session they sat on the living room floor and rolled the ball back and forth to each other. Or threw it aside intentionally for the fun of retrieving it. Joy was adept at retrieving balls from behind the recliner and the armchair. She discovered two balls under the sofa and gave one to Wendy, "Look! Joy find it. Joy find it me." Wendy tried to bounce her ball but it slipped from her hands. Joy said, disdainfully, "She don't even know how to bounce it." When it escaped again, Wendy announced, "I get it," and did. Joy, turning a corner too sharply, slipped on the rug and fell. Wendy says, "I pick her up," climbs off Peggy's lap, and goes to Joy. She crouches in front of her, searching her face, "Allright? Allright? Allright? Allright? Allright?" She touches Joy's knee. She stands up and shakes her head, "Allright, don't fall down, OK?" She turns to Peggy and says, "Joy fall down."

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Joy often got chewing gum and candy cigarettes from the corner store. Prodded into sharing, she relinquishes a cigarette. Wendy puts it into her mouth, strikes an imaginary match and lights it, shakes out the match, drops it into the ashtray. She stands, hand on hip, dangling the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. She goes to Liz for a light. Wendy was a beauty like her mother. She had the same delicate features, the same ivory skin. Her eyes were large and thickly lashed like Liz' but blue instead of brown. Liz had auburn hair; Wendy's was blonde. Sometimes Wendy and her mother sat together on the sofa, looking at books. Liz identifies the robin, bunny rabbit, fox, opossum. She says, "Look. Look. There's a skunk. Say, 'skunk.'" Wendy: "Skunk. Hi, skunk!" Liz tells the stories of Pinocchio, Bambi,'and Cinderella. Wendy glances from the page to her mother's face and back to the page. Liz: "See her talkin to her sisters. See, they make her do all the work in the house. See. They're laughin at her now." Wendy: "Hm?" Liz: "They're laughin at her. She's cryin." Wendy: "Cry." Liz: "She feels bad." Wendy: "Huh? A bad." Wendy disappears into her bedroom and returns with a xylophone. She tries to play it, pounding several keys at once. Liz takes the hammer and shows her how to hit each key in turn. Wendy exits again and returns with the jack-in-the-box. Liz continues to play the xylophone. Wendy had a strong will which sometimes clashed with her mother's. She refused to honor commands. She issued demands and stuck to them. "Want ninny." Liz: "No." "Want ninny." "No." "Want ninny!" "No." "Want NINNY!" "I said NO . . ." Wendy leans forward, glaring, throws herself against the back of the recliner. Rocks violently back and forth. This time Liz relents. Wendy seizes the ninny and, with relish, plunks it into her mouth. "I do the same old thing every day. I get up. Feed her. I wash clothes if there's any to be washed. I iron. Clean the house, you know. Pick up. Twice a week I gotta clean around here. And then I will sit down for a little while and I go and get up. I fix her supper. When I get done there I go over and watch the store. Then I come up and go to bed. It's the same thing every day. You know, take her up to my mother's after supper. Come back and watch the store. Bring her up, give her a bath, put her to bed. It's the same thing. It's a routine. And it gets to be very monotonous. That's why on Fridays I look forward to goin out with Pat. I go out with her for a little

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62 The Children and Their Families while on Fridays. And I look forward to that because it breaks the monotony of every day. But it is monotonous. The whole routine of my life right now is nothin but a monotony. It s no thin but a routine. It would still be a routine even if I had a job. When you think about it your life is nothin but a routine." Liz and Wendy lived next to a corner store where neighborhood kids gathered, drinking sodas and playing the pinball machines. Liz' boyfriend, Steve, had staked his hope on this store, and so had Liz. Liz had a small, neat apartment. The living room was furnished in shades of green, brown, and orange, adorned with artificial roses and knickknacks on plastic doilies. Photographs of Wendy and of Steves children were displayed in a glassed case. Wendy h a d her own bedroom, which Liz had fixed up to "make it look like a little girl's room." Liz was twenty-one when she got pregnant. Her parents took her in, supported her during the pregnancy. When Wendy was a few months old, Liz married Wendy's father, Ed. A month later she left him for good. "I just couldn't stand it any more. All he did was accuse me of everything under the sun. He wouldn't even let me walk up to my mother's unless he went with me. Wouldn't let me go to the grocery store unless he went with me. I couldn't even go to my friend's house unless he went with me. Then he'd have to come back and pick me up or he'd stay there with me the whole time. I could never do nothin. And he was workin at this place and he called me every break that he got to make sure I was at his mother's house. Cause we lived there with his mother. I just got fed up with it, so one night, it was Wednesday, and I left. It was June nineteenth and it was a Wednesday. I told his mom, I said, 'Miss Margaret, I'm goin back home.' And she said that was the wisest thing that I could ever do just because he was never gonna do nothin." After she left, Liz started receiving public assistance. Ed did not visit Wendy or contribute to her support. Liz met Steve when Wendy was about a year old. Their relationship was difficult, tumultuous, painful. There were fights and lulls, the struggle to succeed with the store, Steve's unexplained departures and returns. Liz hated it when he put her down in public. "He likes to treat me as a child. Like I'm his child, you know. He's gotta correct me and make me look stupid in front of everybody. Just gotta make hisself look big, in front of them. You know, 'I'm the boss,' so to speak, you know. 'Who's the boss? I'm the boss, not you.' I told him, I said, 'Ain't no boss in this house. We're both the same.' I said, 'You're not my boss and I'm not your boss.' I said, 'But if it gets down to it I'm

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The Children and Their Families 63 gonna be your boss.' I'll tell him. I don't care. I never used to be like that. I used to sit there like a d a m n flower. Just sit there and don't say nothin, just let him sit there and put me down to no end. Till I got to the point where I got fed up with it. And I just come out and said what I h a d to say and that was it. And if he didn't like it, he could get off somewhere. "But I don't know. Here lately though when we're by ourselves he'll treat me really good. He'll sit there, he'll talk to me. He starts havin conversations with me about different things. I mean it's not only as if bein lovers but friends. And I think that's the way it should be. Because in order to really develop a deep relationship you gotta be friends first." Liz felt that a relationship should be based on empathy and m u t u a l respect. She knew a couple whose marriage she admired. "It's a equal relationship . . . and like they can really ask one another, like they can consider one another's feelings apart from theirself first. And that's the way I think it should be." Liz was friends with Steve's sisters, particularly Sue, who stopped in after school, babysat occasionally. She was a friend, but she was much younger than Liz. From time to time Liz went out with other women her age. Barb lived with her for a few weeks. So did Diane. Liz' ideal of friendship involved constancy, reciprocity, a willingness to listen, to help when problems arise. "I had a true friend at one time. The best friend I ever had. Her name was June . . . When we h a d problems and troubles we would cry on each other's shoulder. If we didn't get, if one of us didn't have any money or somethin and the other one had money and we would have ice cream or somethin, one would treat the other one and the next time the other one would treat the other one. We were always together." Liz was an only child. When she h a d a problem, she went to her mother for advice. "Every time she's ever told me anything and she's predicted somethin, it always come true. Never fails. I don't know why." There were certain things Liz couldn't discuss with her mother. "Personal, personal things. Cause she don't really understand. She just don't wanna discuss it." Her father didn't say much, but when he did, it was important. "Like my father said to me last night, he said to me, 'All you gotta remember the rest of your life is she's [Wendy] the only thing that you got that's yours.' And he says, 'Ain't nobody can say that she's not yours and she's the only thing you got and you're the only person she has. And don't you forget it.'"

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64 The Children and Their Families Liz' mother took care of Wendy in the evenings. Wendy played with her toys or watched TV with her grandfather. Pop liked to tease her. Sometimes Mamom took her down to Henrietta Street to visit Aunt Edith and Uncle Roy (Liz' great-aunt and uncle). On Fridays Wendy stayed overnight with her grandparents. Mamom taught her to say, "Now I lay me down to sleep." Wendy usually rose about 9:00 in the morning. She watched TV while Liz prepared breakfast. After eating, she returned to the living room to play or watch TV until lunch. She took a nap in the early afternoon. Then, "Me and her'll sit here on the sofa and play or I'll read a book to her or somethin. Get those blocks out and she'll sit on the floor and play with blocks or somethin. If I'm washin dishes, she'll come out there and stand on a chair and play in the water, talk to me while I'm washing dishes. She likes to help me fix supper, so to speak. She comes out here and sits on the chair and tries to, hands me everything, the fork, and she tries to help. She really does." Sometimes Liz made suggestions for symbolic play. She suggested that Wendy give the doll a drink, take her for a ride. She encouraged Wendy to dance, to play her guitar. They threw the ball back and forth across the living room. They tussled and tickled in the recliner. Sometimes Wendy was absorbed in her own play. This gave Liz the chance to make careful, detailed observations of her behavior. "I was watchin yesterday and she was standin up here by the sofa, turning pages like she was reading it [the book]. I think she must a had about four of em lined up in a row. She'd look at one, and she'd close it and then she'd look at another one and close that and pile em all up, you know, like a little pile, and set em aside. And then she'd go back to the monkey and start talkin to it or something. "She'll hug her doll and she'll lay it here on the sofa, cover it up, and talk to it, 'OK? Night-night.' She'll get up here on the sofa and lay down with it and cover her and the baby doll u p and tell me, 'Nighty night.' And lay there like she's asleep and she'll look at me and she'll get back up and pick the baby doll up, and put it on the motorcycle and try to ride it around the room. She'll kiss the baby doll. She'll say, 'Love you,' to the baby doll. I was watchin her the other night doin that." Liz believed that children learn to talk "by what they hear from other people. I think they pick things up from what other people say. And from me, you know, try in to teach Wendy different words to say." She said that Wendy learned most from her and her mother.

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"And just probably those kids around her neighborhood, pick up things, different little things. When we had the store she picked up a lot of things from kids in there and talkin to em. Like slang words and stuff. She'd come and say—like Fonzie on TV—she stands up and she go, 'Hey Fonzie/ It was so cute." Liz tried to correct Wendy's speech. "Like if she says 'ain't' I try to teach her different, to say 'isn't.'" She didn't want her to say cuss words. "Cause she hears that all the time from those kids around here. I try to teach her to talk right. She does not understand but I figure if I teach her now she'll understand when she gets older." Liz also tried to teach manners. "We try to tell her to say 'yes,' not 'yeah.' And, you know, 'please' and 'thank you' to people. Cause I don't just wanna let her say 'gimme that' without sayin 'please' to people." Liz liked Wendy's friendliness, curiosity, and playfulness, but she disliked the tantrums. "She's more or less a happy baby except for when she throws those fits like she does. She gets to the point where she starts throwin those fits and she gets on everybody's nerves, with her screamin and hollerin. "I can't stand that when she does that. It makes me so mad, it gets me so nervous. Then I hit her and then I feel bad about it. I feel bad and I pick her up and start huggin her and Steve'll say, 'You gotta correct her.' Cause if you don't, she's gonna just think, 'Well, I can get away with anything.'" Liz said that Wendy threw fits when she couldn't have her own way. "She's spoiled. She's an extremely spoiled child. She gets anything she wants. And when she don't get it, she gets mad and starts stampin her feet and throwin herself on the ground and cry in." Sometimes Wendy got into fights with other children. Liz handled these by determining first who was at fault. "I make her apologize if she's in the wrong. If she's not in the wrong, I won't. I let her stand there and fight." Looking to the future, Liz imagined a better life for Wendy. She placed a high value on friendship, happiness, and education. Liz, unlike her parents, had graduated from high school. Afterward she had trained for a while as a beautician. Liz hoped that Wendy would go "all the way through school. And if there's enough money and she wants to go to another type of school, even a college or something, if she's smart enough to go there, I'd like to see her do that. I'd just like to see her have a better education than what I had so she'll be able to get a better job. So she'll be able to support herself."

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66 The Children and Their Families Beth Beth maneuvered her mini-wheel between the beds, past the cardboard carton in which her toys were kept, and over to the refrigerator where her mother, Nora, stood, pouring milk into her coffee. She took her dolls, Louise and Loretta, for rides, the stuffed poodle, the bear—each had a turn alone or with her. She pulled off her paj a m a top and p u t on a t-shirt. Shunned Nora's attempts to help. Then she put on her turquoise spring coat and matching hat. Clad in these motley pieces, she pedaled out to the bathroom and back, dismounted, used the bike as a scooter. She looked at the books that Nora bought at the second-hand shop. She named the cat, the duck, the cow. Chortled over the baby PigShe devoted many hours to the care of her babies—covering and uncovering, dressing and undressing, cleaning, comforting, putting to bed. She combed Loretta's hair. "Hold still. Uh oh hold still! Lay back. Hold still." She took them down to the A&P for ice cream, to the doctor's, the hospital, Papaw's house. Sometimes these excursions were made alone, while her mother worked nearby. Often Nora joined in the fantasy. Beth divided up her world according to what belonged to whom. She called the toys in my toy bag "baby toys." The truck, nesting bowls, dowel and donuts obviously belonged to the doll who always accompanied them. The doll was "Peggy baby" and later "Peggy's baby" because Peggy owned it, but it was also "my baby," because, as Nora said, Beth knew that she had "more advantage over it" than any other child who came into the house. She was sensitive to challenges—feigned and real—to her claims to objects. She asserted her ownership. She was emphatic, "That my coat." She learned to mark by teasing what she "got" and someone else lacked. Next to her mother, Beth's most frequent playmate was her five-year-old cousin Lori, who was present for two of the taping sessions. They were difficult to record: scrambling over the a r m of the sofa, climbing onto the coffee table, marching, prancing, crawling, and sliding on the coffee table; racing out to the middle room and back to the living room and out again; whooping and yeaing, yelling, "Superman!" Lori grabs Beth's hands and they swing their a r m s back and forth. Beth sings, "Shake a boogie!" Lori sings "Shake your boogie!" Lori leans over the mike and says, "Hello in there!" Beth leans over the mike. "Hello. Hello. Hello." Lori: "Hello, sweetheart!" Beth:

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The Children and Their Families 67 "Hello, my kitty cat." Lori: "Hello, sugar roll." Beth: "Hello." Lori says, "You like to see my Nora boyfriend!" and screams. Beth squeals, "Yea boyfriend. Yeah ah ah." Lori swings her a r m s . Beth claps her hands and swings her a r m s . Lori called Beth "sister" and "best friend." Together they committed acts of defiance. Beth takes a used match from the ashtray and says, "Here Lori. Here Lori. I'm light stick." She lights Lori's cigarette (stick). Lori takes a slow drag. They giggle. Sometimes the best friends fought. There were mock battles between the ghost and the frightened victim. There were real disputes over dolls and toys. They teased, made claims and counterclaims. They tugged, cried, threw, hit. Sometimes Beth pushed Lori aside and jumped off the chair unassisted. She showed that she could build a tower by herself, buckle her own shoe. But often Lori took the lead and Beth followed. Lori directed the sleeping of the babies: "My baby's sleepin. What's your baby doin?" Beth picks up her baby. Lori takes the baby from her and lays it on the floor next to her own baby. "Here. Put your baby just like this." Beth crawls toward her baby and says, "A baby." Lori continues, "They're sleepin. Come on. Lay down with them. Come on. Here's another cover." Beth and Lori lay down next to the babies. Lori says, "Hug your baby." Beth puts her a r m around her baby. Beth listened attentively to Lori and often repeated what she said. "I can write my whole name." "I write whole name." She seldom imitated her mother's words, but she talked more with her than with Lori. Beth and Nora cavorted less, fantasized more. Beth announces that she is going to cook and proceeds to prepare a meal in my nesting bowls. Nora says, "Well, feed me." And then, in the voice of a baby, "I'm hungry, mommy. I'm hungry, m o m m y ! " Beth, still cooking, says, "OK!" Nora continues to fuss and whine. She is an impatient baby. Demanding. Beth has to tell her again and again to wait while the food cooks. Finally it's ready. Nora: "Oh boy, what do you got for m e ? " Beth: "A chicken." Nora eats b u t doesn't get enough. Beth goes back to the stove. She asks, "You w a n t more? Want m o r e ? " Nora complains that the chicken wasn't done. Beth offers her some coffee. Nora whines, "Let me feed my own self. I'm a big girl. I want to feed my own self." It takes her a long time to convince Beth. "Mm you big girl? Drink your coffee." Beth prepares another dish for Nora, offers her milk, more coffee. Eventually Nora is full and Beth feeds herself.

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68 The Children and Their Families "You know, when I'm by myself I'm just like a little kid. I like to play with their toys, you know. I'll get her with me. And we both, we sit sometimes and play and play as if I ain't got nothin to do." Nora named Beth's dolls. Louise was her favorite. When Beth was little, clumsy, Nora watched that she didn't smother Louise or bend back her fingers or push the bottle too forcefully into her mouth. Sometimes Louise laughed at Beth, loved Nora more than Beth; she could be a wicked tease. Louise was old, bald, limp from lost stuffing. Loretta, who used to belong to Grandma, was beautiful in a red crocheted dress. "Gotta leave the clothes on," Nora told Beth; "she'll catch a cold and everybody see her body." In play with Beth, Nora slipped easily in and out of roles: a jealous playmate; an aggrieved mother, denied a kiss by her little girl; a movie star decked out in beads and sunglasses. "Watch me look pretty. I'm gonna be pretty . . . I'm a movie star. Da-da!" By example, suggestion, enthusiasm she created a climate that fostered and sustained symbolic play. Fantasy, enjoyed for its own sake, was also a means of directing Beth's behavior. When Beth was born Nora was barely twenty years old, but she already knew a lot about children. She had babysat for neighbors, raised Lori from infancy to four years of age. Her confidence, her convictions about child raising were grounded in personal experience, daily observation. She was affectionate, relaxed, attentive. Beth's interests were indulged despite possible damage to material things: she was allowed to bounce on the bed, play with her mother's beaded necklace, "sew" with a real needle. Nora had a sharp eye for the challenging activity that enabled Beth to test her capabilities without risking too much frustration. Nora believed that children learn by doing for themselves, helping, copycatting. "If she wants to wash something out, I let her wash it out so she can wear it, if she wants to help me clean stuff. That's not having her own way. She's only learning." "All kids are gonna copycat. I don't care who they are, they're gonna copycat. Cause I do it myself, copycat. If I see a singer on TV I have to get up in front of the mirror and sing." Nora believed that children learn to talk by listening to other people. "Like I said, you think she's not listening but she's listening. That's how she learns these words and then she puts em together in her mind. She'll put it together. Like say she hears us talkin now. Okay, she sees you noddin your head, [going] 'Mm hm.' She'll see you answer and she'll pick that up and I'll talk to her and she'll go 'Mm hm.'" Nora sometimes helped Beth to respond ap-

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The Children and Their Families 69 propriately in conversation. "Well, Pop [Nora's father] was askin her somethin and she answered him. But before she answered, I gave her the complete word to say for it . . . When he says,' Where s Lori a t ? ' I told her to say, 'Well, she's home right now. She got off a school at 3:00.' So she did. She said it after I said it. That's how she learns too." Nora said that she told Beth to talk to older people with respect, say "thank you" and "you're welcome." She admonished Beth for saying bad words. When she said, "fuck," "I just took Beth and I went, 'That's bad. Don't you ever say that no more. I don't w a n n a hear it no more.' I said, 'That's a bad word. Don't use that word.'" Most of what Beth knew about language, she learned from her mother, but she also learned from Lori, her grandfather and grandmother, and the neighborhood children, according to Nora. There were some things Nora couldn't teach her. "Now I don't know the high class words, so she ain't gonna learn that. The only way she learn that is from Jim [a friend who had a high school education] cause he's sort of intelligent. He's bright. He's the one I'm gonna get to sit down and help her when she gets older. Cause I, she'll liable to be smart, where I can't read or nothin like that . . . And then by her bein smart, she can help her mommy. And I think she like that." Nora favored a method of discipline that clearly discriminated between good and bad behavior, utilized comparisons between children, played on feelings of jealousy through the judicious denial of privilege. "Don't let em have this. Buy this one this and not the other one because they did something bad, they don't deserve it, and show the other one that they deserved it." She related, for example, that Beth h a d taken all the toys out of the toy box and refused to put them back. "So then I took Lori and went upstairs and locked the bathroom door, and I said, 'Come on, Lori, you can take a bath with me. Beth's not because she didn't put the toys back.' By time I come downstairs to peek on her, she done put the toys back up. I said, 'Good girl, now come on, you can come and take a bath.'" Sometimes Nora spanked Beth. But she often spoke out against people who physically abuse their children. "Don't have to hit on em all the time. That can make em go nuts and mad. [A child thinks] 'How come they're hittin on me? I'm only a little baby. They're bigger than I am. I ain't got a chance.'" Over and over again Nora expressed her approval of Beth s anger. "I like her when she gets mad. I'm tellin you, she'll, she'll take that ashtray and d u m p it all over the floor and she'll tear up stuff

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like this. She's got a temper." After witnessing a display of anger, Beth s grandfather laughed and shook his head, "That Beth can get mad as hell, can't she?" Nora was proud that Beth could defend herself. "She got a hold of Lori s arm, you know. It cracked me up cause Beth was real little. Little against her, you know. She grabbed Lori by the arm like this and she go, 'I'll beat the shit out of you.' That's what she said. I'll beat the shit out of you.' That was funny. I couldn't help from laughin." Learning to defend yourself involves learning not to be a sissy. "Sometimes it's good to cry, but I just use that [the word "sissy"] for a phrase for Beth. And show people that if she can take, oh boy, I don't know, she can take in more than others can. And it helps her nerves, you know." Nora stressed the importance of learning to control hurt feelings, but she made a distinction between situations in which it's all right to cry and situations in which it isn't. "Well, when I beat her on her hiney, she'll cry. And when she wants to go outside, I sometimes tell her, 'That's a sissy' But then once in a while, she'll cry. Oh, this and that, off and on, she'll cry. But then like somebody, when she's bein hit [by another child] or she's seein somebody gettin hurt, I say, 'Don't cry. You ain't no sissy' And she don't. Now like when she sees Millie gettin a needle you figured she'd cry because . . . Lori does. Lori cries. But she don't. That's what I'm tryin to explain. She don't have that much of feelins. And it's good to cry once in a while, like I said, but like Lori does it constantly. It's easy for her feelins to get hurt. And it would be embarrassment on her side when she grows up. On Beth's side if it does work out the way it should, she won't do that in front of people, she'll rather go some place else and do it and cry. She doesn't let her feelins show in front of people. And that's what I do [don't show my feelings] and that's what some men don't like about me. And I don't like cryin in front of a man." Nora also disapproved of spoiling children, a danger which often befalls the child who has no sisters or brothers. An only child thinks "it's the this and that. It's everything. It's the most beautiful thing that ever walked the earth. It can get more than what it can get in other families. And it corrupts their mind." Nora was the youngest girl in her family. She had four older sisters and one younger brother. Her sister Loretta was the favorite. "Had everything she wanted. I didn't get nothin. I don't care. I wasn't jealous." Her father now prefers Loretta's daughter, Lori. "He's got, he's savin money for Lori in the bank. And not for her [Beth]. I'm not jealous. I don't care. It don't bother me."

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The Children and Their Families 71 When she was sixteen and in the special eighth grade, the principal told Nora's mother to take her out of school. "Well, I was quiet at first but, and then teacher speaks u p - - I couldn't hardly hear that good, and I told her to speak a little louder, you know— and she said, 'You're so quiet, Nora' . . . I says, I t ' s none of your business why I'm so quiet. I'm doin my work, ain't I? And I talk to you when you talk to me.' And she say, 'Look young lady, don't get s m a r t with me.' Then she would get up and grab me around the neck a n d I hit her back. I couldn't stand it." "I couldn't take it any more and I says, 'I'm gonna start fightin back,' and I did. And the nigger people would, the nigger kids would take and take their books and everything and hit me on the head with rulers. And I would sit there at my desk and didn't let the teacher see me cryin and I would just cry. And I said, 'Boy, I can't take it any more' and I got up and I pushed three niggers against the wall over the desks and that's when they took me out of school cause they said the niggers made a threat they'd get me after school. They just told m o m m y to take me out. Yeah, they used the excuse I couldn't learn. I was a slow learner. But everybody that was in the class was slow learners too. But they used that as a excuse. Now that goes to show you, they w a n n a help people and everything. I should a went on TV for it. I should a really poured it on. I sayin, 'You know what? They took me out of school because I was a slow learner. They didn't want to teach me. Now how do you like t h a t ? ' " After leaving school, Nora helped around the house, cleaned for people, took care of Lori. She discovered that she was pregnant and went to the welfare office for help. When Beth was born she was so happy that she couldn't stop grinning. "I grinned so much my face was stretched tight." Later, she fell in love with Gordon. She wanted to get out of the house, and she wanted a m a n who resembled her child. When Beth was a year old, she married him. Eighteen years old and lacking a high-school diploma, he looked for work, occasionally found odd jobs. Nora continued to receive $242 per month plus food stamps for herself and Beth. At the time of the first video taping session Beth was twentyfive months old and Nora was pregnant with her second child. The family h a d just moved to an a p a r t m e n t in a large corner rowhouse. Because the landlord reneged on his promise to repair the kitchen and living roojn, they lived in one bedroom with a tiny, adjoining bathroom. Nora cooked on a hotplate and washed clothes in the b a t h t u b . Lori often spent the weekends there. Gordon's mother came around, finding fault with Nora's method of child rearing, getting on her nerves, Gprdon was out a lot. It got quiet, closedrin

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72 The Children and Their Families

way up there on the third floor through the long afternoons. Nora and Beth started spending more time at her parents' place in Highlandtown, often staying over for several days or weeks at a time, eventually moving in. Sometimes Gordon joined them there; sometimes he didn't. He and Nora argued and fought, separated and went back together. She wanted him to get a steady job. Nora's parents rented a two-story house which they shared with their son and the various relatives who visited, spent the weekend, or lived there temporarily. Video tapes III-X were made in the living room of this house. Nora's father was sixty-six years old. He still drove a newspaper truck full time, and he talked even faster than Nora and much louder. He boomed and taunted, made one helluva racket. Liked to play the horses. Go on down to Charlestown on a Friday night. He took an interest in the taping sessions: wanted to direct. Nora's mother was tired, and shy as Gordon. She sat out in the kitchen, smoking and drinking coffee. Toward the end of the study Nora gave birth to Millie, another blonde. She described Beth's introduction to the baby: "When she seen me come out of the hospital, she cried a little bit and she says, 'There's my mommy. Mommy got my baby sister.' She said, 'Baby sister, my baby sister.' She wanted to get the cover off the head to look at it. Jumpin and cheerin and kissin all over it." Beth helped with the baby. She snatched the baby's bottle when her mother wasn't looking and drank from it. During the eleventh taping session Beth leaned over her baby sister and spoke in a high-pitched voice, "Talk to the camera. Talk to it."

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4

Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking When I asked Liz how children learn to talk, she said, "By what they hear from other people. I think they pick things up from what other people say. And from me, you know, tryin to teach Wendy different words to say." Marlene said that children learn by listening and emphasized the importance of talking early and often to children. She described how she taught Amy to improve her pronunciation. "So I would sit her down and I would, you know, make the sounds with her." Nora told how she taught Beth the appropriate response to her grandfathers question. "When he says, 'Where's Lori a t ? ' I told her to say, 'Well, she's home right now. She got off a school at 3:00.' So she did. She said it after I said it. That's how she learns too." To these mothers, language learning involves an interaction between the child and other people—who not only speak to the child but actively teach her. The mothers' beliefs about language learning are interesting in their own right but also embody valuable insights into language socialization. This is not to say that what a mother expressed (to a particular listener on particular occasions) was the sum of what she knew about language learning. Surely, the bulk of that knowledge was tacit, more or less inaccessible to conscious thought. Nor does it mean that there is necessarily a relationship between beliefs and behavior, between a mother s views about language development and her conduct with novice speakers. Nevertheless, what a person says about language learning, especially when that person is intimately involved in the process, tells us something worth knowing. It provides a point of departure for an inquiry into language socialization and its meanings. Beginning, then, with the mothers' belief that teaching contributes importantly to language learning, we can ask whether the families did, in fact, teach the children. This question could be answered by examining the transcripts of the video-recorded observations. I extracted from the transcribed stream of talk, from the many other kinds of interactions that families constructed with two-year-olds, those in which the mother or another caregiver assumed the role of teacher, the child the role of pupil for "lessons"

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Instruction

that dealt with language and speaking. In these interactions the teacher explicitly told the child what to say or how to say it, or quizzed her on these matters. That is, she (1) attempted to elicit an imitation (e.g., "Say 'keep off,'" "Go, 'aw, the pretty little baby/"); (2) prompted the child to respond verbally (e.g., "What do you say?"); (3) directed the child to tell or ask (e.g., "Tell her you're sorry," "Ask the baby if she wants some."); or (4) quizzed the child about the name of a person or object obviously known to the speaker (e.g., "What's that?").1 Some interactions included a single instruction-response sequence, as when Liz said, "What do you say?" and Wendy replied, "Thank you." Others included a long chain of related instructions, as when five-year-old Kris quizzed Amy about the names of the stuffed animals: K holds stuffed dog; A sitting next to K on sofa.2

AMY

doggie/ doggie/

K picks up elephant.

doggie/ baby/

K prompts A.

What? A doggie, yeah. What is this? What? No. Uh—. Uh—.

Pig/ elephant/ A touches own foot. K picks up tiger.

KRIS (cousin) What is it?

got my foot/ baby/

Uh—. Elephant. Yeah elephant. What's this? Tiger. You don't know nothin. You say all baby.

Eventually the children began to ask What-questions. Interactions of this sort are described below in "Naming People and Things." 2 The following format is used: nonverbal behaviors on the left, child speech

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Direct Instruction

K picks up pig.

baby/ piggy/ piggy/

A crumbles chip bag.

piggy/

75

What's this? What? What is it? Pig! Pig. Pig. Say "pig." Say "pig."

oh/ Say "pig." Oop. You should a said "pig." A a n d K begin to eat chips.

(AMY VII; 23:02) 3

Later in the same sample Kris took a doll from Amy, and Marlene helped Amy to reassert her claim by giving her the appropriate lines to say: AMY M takes doll from Kris. M places doll in her lap; A stands beside M.

/4 my baby/

MARLENE (mother) Oh, what did she (Kris) do?

Tell her [Kris], say "keep off." A watches M wrap doll in blanket.

keep off/ keep off/

A crying. A swats at K. A moves closer to M.

you hurt it/ —/ keep off/ my baby/

Say "you hurt it."

(AMY VII; 23:02)

in the middle, speech of others on the right. Speakers are identified initially by name, and subsequently by first initial. 3 Each example is identified by child (Amy), sample (VII), and age of child in months and days (23:02). 4 This symbol, /, is used to indicate that the utterance was Unintelligible.

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76 Direct Instruction These examples of direct instruction contrast with interactions involving other kinds of language socialization strategies. Consider, for example, the following teasing interaction in which Beth, like Amy, asserts her claim to an object: N begins to play with my nesting bowls, smiling. B turns quickly toward N. B approaches N. B on all fours in front ofN.

BETH

me play/

B moves closer to nesting bowls.

baby toys/ baby toys/

B picks up bowl. N interrupts B's utterance, grabs bowl back from B. B extends hand toward bowl.

baby toys/

B walks toward coffee table. B picks up big bowl. B walks back to N. B puts bowl at N s feet.

NORA (mother) Well, heck. If she don't wanna play with the toys, I will. I'm play in with the toys. (N in aside to investigators: You know, when I'm by myself I'm just like a little kid. I like to play with their toys, you know. I'll get her with me. And we both, we sit sometimes and play and play as if I ain't got nothin to do.) I had it first!

baby toys/

baby's/

That baby's toys, but I had it first. You wait. I'm buildin. Give me that big one.

(BETH VI; 28:07) Nora first challenges Beth's claim to my toys (which Beth called "baby toys" because they were always accompanied by a doll). There are several signs that this is a mock challenge rather than a real challenge. Nora smiles. Her tone of voice is unusual—a kind of

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77

exaggerated smugness, a provocation to jealousy. And, once Nora has secured Beth s interest in playing with the toys, she readily includes Beth ("Give me that big one") and the two proceed to build a tower together. In the meantime Beth has responded to the challenge with a series of counter-claims and an attempt to take possession of the toys. Teasing interactions occurred routinely in this family and provided opportunities for Beth to practice asserting herself and coping with feelings of anger and jealousy. It is beyond the scope of this book to examine teasing and other kinds of language socialization strategies. (See Miller 1980 for a preliminary analysis of teasing routines.) I mention them by way of emphasizing that the children engaged in many kinds of interactions besides those involving direct instruction. I argue later that direct instruction is an effective way of transmitting certain kinds of linguistic and social knowledge—but it is certainly not the only way that Amy, Wendy, and Beth learned about language and speaking. It turned out that all of the families did engage in direct instruction, but they did so to varying degrees. During the eight analyzed samples Amy participated in a total of 129 interactions involving direct instruction. This compared with only 78 for Beth and 77 for Wendy. The interactions were classified according to the type of lesson. Seven categories emerged: naming people and things; speaking appropriately; speaking appropriately to dolls; rhyming, singing, and playing verbal games; using correct grammar, pronunciation, and intonation; counting, reciting the alphabet, and identifying colors; and other. Presented in Table 7 are the n u m b e r of interactions per category for each of the children. By far the most frequent category for all three children was naming people and things. Interactions in this category were analyzed in detail. In the following sections I describe the different kinds of instructional interactions and ask what the children learned from each.

Naming People and Things During the third sample Wendy and her mother named the pictures in Wendy's books. Liz sat on the sofa, book open on her lap. Wendy stood beside her, gazing from the pictures to her mother s face and back to the pictures. Liz paged slowly, pointing, asking for names, waiting, repeating, correcting, approving. She was thorough. Bambi had many friends, and each was identified: "Say 'bee.'" "Bee." "Say 'fox.'" "Fox." "Say 'possum.'" "Possum."

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table 7. Frequency of Interactions Involving Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking Amy Category

I

Naming people and things Speaking appropriately Speaking appropriately to dolls Rhyming, singing, playing verbal games Using correct grammar, pronunciation, intonation Counting, reciting the alphabet, identifying colors Other Total

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII VIII Total

14 4 5

6 3

3 2

9 4

7 1

9 1

10 7

2 1

60 24

7

0

1

0

2

0

1

0

11

0

4

12

4

4

2

0

0

26

3

0

0

0

0

0

0

0 2

2 0

0 0

0 1

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

2 3

31

15

18

18

14

12

18

3

129

Wendy Category

I •

•

Naming people and things Speaking appropriately Speaking appropriately to dolls Rhyming, singing, playing verbal games Using correct grammar, pronunciation, intonation Counting, reciting the alphabet, identifying colors Other Total

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•

•

II •

III •

•

6 5 1 6

IV •

V

VI

'

VII VIII Total

'

9 1 0 1 1

3 0

•

2 4

-

i

2 1

8 3

.

.

.

.

3

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

4

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1 1

1

14

0

12

0

.

45 17

0

2 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

3 1

7 2

10

13

3

7

3

15

77

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79

Table 7 continued

Category

I

Naming people and things Speaking appropriately Speaking appropriately to dolls Rhyming, singing, playing verbal games Using correct grammar, pronunciation, intonation Counting, reciting the alphabet, identifying colors Other Total

Beth IV V VI VII VIII Total

II

III

9 3

8 2

1 1

3 3

1 0

3 3

4 0

8 2

37 14

2

1

0

0

0

1

1

0

5

0

0

2

2

0

0

0

0

4

6

0

1

2

0

0

0

0

9

0 0

0 2

0 2

0 1

0 1

2 1

0 0

0 0

2 7

20

13

7

11

2

10

5

10

78

"Say 'mice.'" "Mice." "Say 'owls.'" "Owls." "Owls, that's good . . ." Among the names Liz wove descriptions, delivered and received with enthusiasm. "Puppies. There they are. Look. Look at em dancin." " H u h ? " "See em dancin?" Wendy swayed, "Da da da da!" Liz smiled, continued, "They're at a carnival . . ." This is an example of a naming sequence—an interaction in which a caregiver helped the child to name one or more people or things. In these interactions the caregiver knew the n a m e of the referent(s), while the child often did not. As mentioned above, naming was the largest category of direct instruction, representing .47 of all instructional sequences for Amy, .58 for Wendy, and .47 for Beth. As can be seen in Table 7, Amy had the highest frequency of naming sequences, but sequences occurred at least once per sample for each of the children. There were no apparent developmental trends in the number of naming sequences. Some naming sequences, such as the one described above, involved several referents—bee, fox, possum, mice, and owls. Corresponding to each referent was one unit of discourse: Liz said, "Say 'bee,'" and Wendy responded, "Bee." In other words, this naming sequence consisted of several naming units. Other naming sequences involved only one naming unit, as in the following example:

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80 Direct Instruction (Amy has been drinking soda from a cup.) MARLENE (mother) AMY What is it? M points into As cup. What's that? beer/ That's—No, it ain't beer. Say "soda." soda/ Soda. (AMY II; 19:15) Here the entire interaction revolved around a single referent (soda). Naming sequences, then, are composed of one or more naming units, and a naming unit is a unit of discourse corresponding to each of the referents in question. Knowing this much about naming sequences raises further questions. How many naming units occurred for each child? Did the n u m b e r of naming units change over time? Who gave direct instruction in names? Data relevant to these questions are presented in Table 8. Displayed here are the frequencies of naming units by sample and participant for Amy, Wendy, and Beth, respectively. For all three children there were many more naming units than naming sequences, and, again, naming units occurred most frequently for Amy. There were no apparent developmental trends in the frequency of naming units. Large numbers of naming units occurred in sample III for Wendy and sample I for Beth. These were samples in which mother and child sat for long periods, naming pictures in books. Each of the mothers participated in the majority of naming units: .81 for Amy's mother, .73 for Wendy's mother, and .70 for Beth's mother. These figures show that for all three children, the mother was the major teacher of names. Other participants in recorded naming sequences were Amy's eight-year-old aunt Judy, her five-year-old cousin Kris, her aunts Karen and Norma, two friends of Wendy's mother, Beth's grandfather, and the investigators. In most cases naming sequences involving the investigators were initiated by the children and the majority occurred in the later samples. For example, in the eighth sample Beth looked at a vase of flowers and asked, "What t h a t ? " I said, "That's a flower. That's a rose." She replied, "A rose." Turning now to Table 9, one sees the kinds of referents that were named. Eight categories emerged: people, pictures, toys, food, clothing, body parts, tools, and miscellaneous objects (e.g., chair, button, camera). The largest category for Amy was names of people,

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81

Direct Instruction Table 8. Frequency of Naming Units by Participant Amy Participant Mother Other speakers21 Total

//

///

IV

V

VI

VII

V7//

Total

23 1

8 0

22 0

7 12

10 0

18 4

6 9

18 1

U2 27

24

8

22

19

10

22

15

19

139

Total

/

Wendy Participant

/

//

///

IV

Vh

VI

VII

VIII

Mother Other speakers 3

5 1

17 0

57 4

6 12

0 4

0 2

1 1

3 9

89 33

6

17

61

18

4

2

2

12

122

Total

Beth Participant

/

Mother Other speakers 3 Total

//

///

IV

V

VI

W/

VIII

Total

31 2

4 4

1 0

3 0

1 0

1 2

2 2

0 8

43 18

33

8

1

3

1

3

4

8

61

a Other Speakers—Amy: Kris 4, Karen 1, Norma 1, Judy 12, Investigators 9; Wendy: Mothers friends 2, Investigators 31; Beth: Grandfather 1; Investigators 17. b Wendy s mother was present for only a few minutes during this sample.

Table 9. Frequency of Naming Units According to Content

People Pictures Toys Food Clothing Body parts Tools Miscellaneous objects Total

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Amy

Wendy

Beth

48 18 19 13 6 17 6 12

15 63 25 5 4 2 0 8

7 27 13 2 1 1 1 9

139

122

61

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82 Direct Instruction accounting for .35 of her naming units. Wendy and Beth received most instruction in naming pictures—.52 of all naming units for Wendy and .44 for Beth. Each referent was visible to Wendy and Beth, but this was not the case for Amy. In about one-fifth of her naming units the referent was not present. Most of these involved elicited imitations of people's names and seemed to be "reviews" of Amy's many relatives and friends. For example: A sits on Ms lap, pocketbook on arm.

AMY

A takes pocketbook off arm. M puts pocketbook aside on lap. M helps A to stand up on her lap. A stands on Ms lap.

MARLENE (mother) Say "Chuckie."

Chuckie/ Tanya/ Russell/ David/ Judy/

Tanya. Tom, Russell David. Judy. Kris,

Kris/

Mamom. A still standing on Ms Mamom/ lap. (Sequence continues through twelve more names.) (AMY III; 20:05) At first glance it may seem odd that Amy should cooperate in naming people who "aren't there." This points up a striking characteristic of naming sequences and, indeed, of instructional sequences in general—namely, a consistently high level of enthusiastic participation on the part of all three children. In this particular case, the material being learned had obvious social and personal value as a reminder to Amy of the significant persons in her life. UNITS PER SEQUENCE

We already know that there were more naming units than naming sequences for each child, but this tells us little about the distribution of units. One possibility is that each sequence was composed of two or three units, Another possibility is that most sequences contained a single unit and one or two consisted of long chains of units. It turned out that for all three children the majority of se-

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83

quences involved a single naming unit (.67 for Amy, .71 for Wendy, and .92 for 3eth), The remaining sequences included multiple units —at least two and as many as forty-three units. Considering only the sequences involving multiple units, the median number of units per sequence was 3.2 for Amy, 3.0 for Wendy, and 14.5 for Beth. There were no apparent changes over time with respect to the proportion of multiple-unit sequences. Amy engaged in the most sequences involving multiple units (twenty), and these contained some interesting relationships. In nine of these the referents were members of a superordinate category, such as body parts, ice cream flavors, tools, or people. In another four sequences successive namings were related in a different way: all referred to important knowledge about Amy s identity. These were the "What's your name? Where do you live?" sequences, which involved successive solicitations of Amy's complete name and address. For example: A examines binoculars.

AMY

know/ Hartley/ Hartley/ mm/ A squats. A examines something on floor. A sits down on floor. A examines binoculars,

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Ostend Street/

know/

MARLENE (mother) What's your name? You don't know? What? Hartley. Where d'y° u live? Say"Ost—." Ostend Street, right. Where else do you live? Say "Bal—."

Bal/ Baltimore/

Baltimore. Maryland.

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84 Direct Instruction A toys with M s sandal.

Maryland/ Allright. Baltimore/ (AMY V; 21:17)

There were only a few instances of multiple namings for Wendy and Beth, but again some of these referred to objects that were related by virtue of membership in a superordinate category. SPEAKERS' ROLES IN NAMING UNITS

So far we have seen that naming sequences involved interactions between the child and another speaker, usually the mother, and that they were composed of one or more naming units. Further examination of the naming units revealed the following three types: (1) Other Speaker Requests Name/Child Responds. This type of naming unit may be illustrated by reference to already familiar examples. When Wendy and her mother looked at picture books, her mother solicited a name by saying, "Say 'bee,'" and Wendy responded, "Bee." Several other naming units followed, all involving similar requests by the mother—"Say 'fox,'" "Say 'possum,'" and so on. Similarly, Amy's mother made a request for a name when she asked, "What is it? What's t h a t ? " Amy responded incorrectly ("beer"); her mother corrected her ("No, it ain't beer. Say 'soda.'"); Amy responded correctly ("soda"); and, finally, her mother repeated Amy's response ("soda"). (2) Child Requests Name/Other Speaker Responds. This type of naming unit is the reciprocal of the one just described. Here the child makes requests for names and the other speaker responds. For example: (Amy has just finished "training" her "baby" to use the potty chair.) AMY MARLENE (mother) A points to picture on what's that?/ back of potty chair. what's that?/ Boy. A points to another what's that?/ picture. Ball. (Sequence continues through sixteen additional naming units of this type.) (AMY VIII; 23:18)

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85

(3) Child Volunteers NamelOther Speaker Responds. Here too the child takes the initiative, but in this case she volunteers the name, and the other speaker responds. In the following example Beth volunteers "duck" and "that a cat," and both times her mother corrects her: (Beth and her mother are looking at a book.)

B points to picture.

BETH duck/ duck/

chicken/ B points to another picture.

that a cat/

B still pointing. N points to picture of cat.

cat there/

NORA (mother) What is that? That's a hen. Just call it a chicken. That's too hard for you. Yeah. Oh, where? No, that's a baby pig. There's the cat.

(BETH I; 25:09)

As can be seen in Table 10, there is considerable variation across children in the distribution of naming units according to speakers' roles. Requests made by adults or older children to the child represented .73 of all naming units for Amy, .76 for Wendy, and only .31 for Beth. When requests by other speakers were examined more closely, some interesting findings emerged. In the typical case the other speaker launched the sequence by requesting a name. However, for Amy there were several instances, primarily in the later samples, in which the other speaker requested a n a m e after Amy had first drawn attention to the object by saying "Look" or "Look, mommy." It is unclear whether Amy was trying to solicit the n a m e or whether the other speaker simply seized this opportune moment to teach another name. Requests made by the child accounted for .02 of Wendy's naming units, .25 of Amy's, and .20 of Beth's. For Amy and Beth there was a striking developmental shift. During the first five samples the children made virtually no requests for names. Each began to

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Table 10. Frequency of Naming Units According to Roles of Speakers Amy Category Other speaker requests name Child requests name Child volunteers name Total

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

24 0

8 0

22 1

18 0

9 0

10 11

0

0

0

0

1

1

24

VII VIII Total (Prop.) 10 4 1

8 ~23~ ~18~ l o " 22

0 19 0

15

19

101 35

(.73) (.25)

3

(.02)

139

(1.00)

Wendy Category Other speaker requests name Child requests name Child volunteers name Total

I

II

III

3 0

14 0

48 16 3 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 0

8

93 2

(.76) (.02)

3

3

11

2

1

1 2

4

27

(.22)

17

61

18

4

2

12

122

(1.00)

7

IV

V

VI

VII VIII Total (Prop.)

2

Beth Category Other speaker requests name Child requests name Child volunteers name Total

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII VIII Total (Prop.)

10 0

4 0

0 0

2 1

1 0

0 1

1 3

1 7

19 12

(.31) (.20)

23

4

1

0

0

2

0

0

30

(.49)

33

8

1

3

1

3

4 "T

61

(1.00)

make requests in the sixth sample $nd by the final sample the children made all or virtually all of the requests for names made during that sample. In other words, requests by Amy and Beth increased markedly and requests by the other speakers declined. (Examination of subsequent samples, IX-XII, for Wendy revealed no recorded instances of requests for names until sample XII, when Wendy not only used such complex What-questions as "What that one there?" but also asked Who-questions in making requests for names.) Finally, names volunteered by the child varied from a low of

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Direct Instruction 87 .02 of all naming units for Amy, to .22 for Wendy, and .49 for Beth. Considering the individual samples, one finds that by far the largest number of volunteered names occurred in the third sample for Wendy and the first sample for Beth. These were the samples during which the children and their mothers named pictures in books. In the context of these lengthy naming sequences the children occasionally volunteered a name before their mothers said "Say 'bird'" or "What's that?" Summary. The following conclusions emerge from the preceding analysis: (1) Naming sequences involved interactions between the child and another more mature speaker who knew the name of the referent in question and assisted the child in naming it. (2) There was individual variation in the frequency of naming sequences, but sequences occurred at least once per sample for all three children. (3) Mothers gave most direct instruction in names but others also participated, including children as young as five years old. (4) The children received instruction in the names of people, pictures, toys, food, clothing, body parts, tools, and various other objects. (5) Naming sequences were composed of naming units—units of discourse corresponding to each of the referents in question. For all three children the majority of sequences consisted of a single unit but some sequences included many units. (6) Three types of naming units were identified, according to speakers' roles: other speaker requests name/child responds, child requests name/other speaker responds, and child volunteers name/ other speaker responds. Although all three children used all three types, there was individual variation in the distribution of types. (7) There was a dramatic developmental shift in requests for names. In the early samples virtually all requests were made by other speakers. In the later samples requests to other speakers decreased and requests by the children increased until in sample VIII for Amy and Beth and sample XII for Wendy, the children made virtually all of the requests for names. NAMING SEQUENCES INVOLVING THE MOTHERS

The preceding analyses were based on all of the naming sequences. Here we take a closer look at those which involved the child's mother. Although mothers were the most frequent participants, only for Amy and Marlene did naming sequences occur at a high enough rate per sample to permit analysis of developmental trends.

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88 Direct Instruction Table 11. Naming Units Involving Mothers: Distribution According to Roles of Speakers Amy N (Prop.)

Wendy N (Prop.)

Beth N (Prop.)

Requests for names made by mother to child

80

(.71)

69

(.78)

15

(.35)

Requests for names made by child to mother

32

(.29)

1

(.01)

2

(.05)

Names volunteered by child to mother

0

(-)

19

(.21)

26

(.60)

Total

112 (1.00)

89 (1.00)

43 (1.00)

Amy and Marlene. Amy and Marlene participated in 42 naming sequences involving 112 naming units. As can be seen in Table 11, all naming units involved requests: either Marlene requested a n a m e from Amy or Amy requested a name from Marlene. Amy did not volunteer names while interacting with her mother. Altogether Marlene made 80 requests for names. These took two major forms. She attempted to elicit an imitation, Say X, or asked a What-question. As shown in the first four rows of Table 12, these forms occurred both singly and in combination. That is, Marlene (1) only attempted to elicit an imitation ("Say 'table'"); (2) only asked a What-question ("What's that?"); (3) combined the two in such a way as to answer her own question ("What's that? Say 'ball.'"); or (4) combined the two so as to correct Amy's incorrect response ("What's t h a t ? " "Candy." "No, say 'peanut.'"). The form Say X alone was by far the most frequent and overall accounted for more than three times as many requests as What-questions alone. The combinations of forms were least frequent, each accounting for only .11 of Marlene s requests. Another way to look at these figures is to ask how many of Marlene's requests included Say X and how many included a Whatquestion—regardless of whether each occurred singly or in combination. These figures are presented in the last two rows of Table 12. For example, in the first sample Say X occurred 17 times alone and 5 times in combination with What-questions, making a total of

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22 (.96) of Marlene s requests which included Say X. Overall, .83 of Marlene s requests included Say X, whereas only .40 included What-questions. However, there was, in general, a decline across the seven samples in the proportion of Say X forms and a corresponding increase in the proportion of What-questions. But this is only part of the picture. How did Amy respond to her m o t h e r s requests for the names of people and things? There are any n u m b e r of possibilities that could have happened. Perhaps Amy was distracted or disinterested and didn't respond at all. Perhaps she replied, but her response was not relevant. Perhaps she responded with a name that was incorrect and, with some prompting from Marlene, eventually produced the correct label. Perhaps she got the n a m e right on the first try. Data relevant to this issue are presented in Table 13. Here Amy's responses are categorized as to type of response. It is important to point out that Amy sometimes responded more than once to a single request, giving, for example, an "other response" followed by a "correct name." The most striking result is that not only did Amy respond at a very high rate (.94) but she also eventually gave correct responses to .85 of her mother s requests. Moreover, she achieved a high rate of correct responding across all seven samples (in which requests occurred): in five of these she eventually responded correctly to at least .90 of her m o t h e r s requests for names. This does not imply that she necessarily arrived at the correct answer on the first attempt. Overall, she gave incorrect responses to .13 of her mother's requests. With a single exception, each incorrect response was followed by the correct response. In addition, Amy gave other responses to .24 of the requests. That is, she responded with a filler, a request for clarification, a comment related to the referent, or a comment unrelated to the referent. The majority of other responses were also followed by the correct response. The category of "no response," which overall was by far the smallest category, occurred most frequently in the first sample. How does Amy's high rate of correct responding relate to the form of her mother's request? Recall that more than .80 of Marlene s requests included attempts to elicit an imitation of a name (Say X). That is, Marlene, in effect, gave Amy the correct answer, and Amy had only to repeat it in order to receive credit for a correct response. This would tend to insure a high rate of correct responding, regardless of Amy's knowledge of naming. Figure 1 charts across the first six samples (1) the proportion of Marlene s requests that included the form Say X; and (2) the proportion of Marlene s

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Table 12. Form of Amy's Mother's Requests for Names: Absolute and Proportional Frequencies in Each Category Category

I

II

III

IV

Say X only What-Q only What-Q + Say X What-Q + Say X (Correction)

17 (.74) 1 (.04) 4 (.17)

7 (.88) 0 (—) 0 (—)

20 (.91) 2 (.09) 0 (—)

2 (.33) 1 (.17) 2 (.33)

1 (.04)

1 (.13)

(—)

Total requests 3

23(1.00)

8 (1.00)

Requests which included Say Xb 22 (.96) Requests which included What-QL 6 (.26)

VI

VII

Total

2 (.20) 3 (.30) 2 (.20)

0 (—) 6 (.75) 0 (—)

0 (—) 1 (.33) 1 (.33)

48 (.60) 14 (.18) 9 (.11)

1 (.17)

3 (.30)

2 (.25)

1 (.33)

9 (.11)

22 (1.00)

6 (1.00)

10(1.00)

8 (1.00)

3 (1.00)

80 (1.00)

8(1.00)

20 (.91)

5 (.83)

7 (.70)

2 (.25)

2 (.67)

66 (.83)

1 (.13)

2 (.09)

4 (.67)

8 (.80)

8(1.00)

3(1.00)

32 (.40)

0

V

Note: In each column the first number is N; the second (in parentheses) is the proportional frequency. Amy's mother made no requests for names during sample VIII. a Due to rounding, total of proportions in columns is not always exactly 1.00. b These figures represent the sum of Say X only, What-Q + Say X, and What-Q + Say X (correction). In parentheses are the proportions of the total requests for names which included Say X. c These figures represent the sum of What-Q only, What-Q + Say X, and What-Q + Say X (correction). In parentheses are the proportions of the total requests for names which included What-Q.

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Table 13. Amy's Responses to Mother's Requests for Names: Absolute and Proportional Frequencies in Each Category Category No response Other response Incorrect name Correct name Total requests 3

I 4 8 1 14 23

(.17) (.35) (.04) (.61)

II

III

0 (—) 0 (—) 1 (.13) 8 (1.00)

1 2 0 21

8

22

(.05) (.09) (—) (.95)

IV 0 (—) 1 (.17) 1 (.17) 6 (1.00) 6

V 0 4 2 9 10

(—) (.40) (.20) (.90)

VI

VII

0 (—) 3 (.38) 3 (.38) 8 (1.00)

0 1 2 2

8

3

(—) (.33) (.67) (.67)

Total 5 19 10 68

(.06) (.24) (.13) (.85)

80

Note: In each column, the first number is N; the second (in parentheses) is the proportional frequency. Proportions = frequency per category/total requests for names. a The figures in the columns do not sum to the number of total requests, as Amy sometimes made more than one response to her mother's request for a name. For example, she sometimes gave an incorrect response, followed by a correct response.

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Instruction

Figure 1. Amy's Rate of Correct Naming in Relation to Form of Mother's Requests

Proportion of mother s requests for names which took the form Say X Proportion of mother s requests for names to which Amy gave correct response

Note: Amy's mother made only three requests for names during sample VII. She made no requests for names during sample VIII.

requests to which Amy eventually responded correctly.5 This figure shows that Amy continued to achieve a high rate of correct responding despite the fact that the form of her mother's requests changed so that she offered fewer and fewer names for Amy to imitate. In other words, Amy's ability to produce the correct answer without her mothers prompts improved across the six samples. The sixth sample seems to be the pivotal one. Not only did Amy respond correctly with minimal help, but she also began to make requests for names. During samples VI, VII, and VIII, she made 31 6 requests to her mother, of which .84 took the form of What-questions. The remaining requests included such forms as "Right there, mommy f " accompanied by a pointing gesture or the elliptical "That f " following a series of "What that?" questions. Marlene responded to all but one (.97) of Amy's requests for names. Amy, in turn, repeated some of the names which she elicited from her mother. A number of Amy's requests clearly referred to objects whose names were unknown to her (e.g., tweezers, violin, trumpet). In the final sample, however, it appeared that she knew the names *I did not include the figures from sample VII because Marlene made only three requests for names. She made no requests for names in sample VIII. Altogether Amy made 32 requests to her motherland one occurred in sample III.

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of at least a few of the objects whose names she solicited. In one case, she correctly answered her own query. Wendy and Liz. Comparing Wendy and her mother with Amy and her mother, one finds both similarities and differences in their naming behavior. As can be seen in Table 11, there were fewer naming units for Wendy and Liz, but in the majority Liz, like Marlene, made requests for names. Moreover, the form of most of Liz' requests was similar to that of Marlene s. That is, she solicited imitations of names (Say X), asked What-questions, or combined the two. There were 45 requests of this sort, .80 of which included Say X and .27 of which included What-questions. Wendy, like Amy, responded at a high rate (.93) and gave correct responses to .89 of her mother s requests. Almost all of her correct responses were imitations of her mothers names. Wendy gave no incorrect responses to requests of this sort. In making requests for names Liz also used some forms which differed from Marlene s. During the picture book sequences of the third sample Liz started out by using the Say X form alone or in combination. Gradually, having established a high rate of elicited imitation from Wendy, she shifted to such forms as "It's a squirrel," "There's the pumpkin," or "Look at the mice." In the context of the naming sequence these forms seemed to function as requests for names. There were 22 such requests during the third sample, 7 and, again, Wendy responded at a high rate (.95). She gave correct responses to half of her mother's requests, and all of these were imitations. Wendy responded to another .36 of Liz' requests by saying simply, "Huh?" In the remaining cases (.14), she either did not respond or gave an "other" response which was not a label. She made no incorrect responses. Wendy requested only one name from her mother during the first eight samples. In the remaining 19 naming units, Wendy volunteered names. Of these, the majority were correct. Liz gave verbal responses to .95 of Wendy's volunteered names. She affirmed Wendy's correct responses, sometimes using forms that she used in her requests for labels (e.g., "Ah huh. It's a puppy" and "What's that, a truck?"). She also corrected Wendy's errors (e.g., "That ain't no boat" and "No, doggie"). Beth and Nora. Beth and her mother, while resembling the other mother-child pairs in some ways, diverged most from the others. Turning once more to Table 11, one sees that naming units occurred least frequently for Beth and Nora. Also, in the majority of naming 7 All but two of Liz' requests of the form It's X, There's X, or Look X occurred in the third sample.

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94 Direct Instruction

units Beth volunteered names, whereas requests made by the mothers predominated for the other mother-child pairs. Nora made only 15 requests for names, and these took the following forms: she named the referent ("That's a bear"), asked a What-question ("What's that?"), or combined these forms so as to correct Beth's response ("What's that?" "Rabbit." "No, that's a bear."). Overall, .53 of Nora's requests included That's X and .87 included a What-question. Only once did Nora use the Say X form preferred by the other mothers. Nevertheless, Beth, like Wendy, seemed to interpret That's X as a request to imitate. Overall, Beth responded at a high rate (.93) to her mother's requests for names and gave correct responses in the majority (.67) of cases. Beth responded incorrectly to .47 of her mother's requests, and the majority of the incorrect responses were followed by correct responses. As already mentioned, all but one of Beth's requests for names occurred in the last three samples. She produced a total of 12 requests and, somewhat surprisingly, only 2 were directed to her mother. The others, addressed to the investigators, included questions about our doll and extension cord. Beth's requests took the form of What-questions and in a few cases she answered her own queries. Beth volunteered a total of 26 names while addressing her mother. Most of these occurred in the context of looking at books. Nora responded to .81 of Beth's volunteered names. She affirmed Beth's correct labelings, saying, for example, "Yeah, that's another one." Or she described another aspect of the picture. For instance, after Beth named the cow, Nora said, "That's his tail. The mice is on his tail." She also corrected Beth's mistakes, using the same forms that she used in her requests for names: "No, that's a chicken," and "What is that? That's a hen." Or sometimes, Nora simply moved on to the next picture and asked Beth to name it. (I do not give any proportions here because in several cases it was impossible to determine whether the volunteered name was correct or not.) Summary. Several conclusions emerge from this analysis: (l)The mother-child pairs varied in the frequency with which they engaged in direct instruction in naming. Amy received the most direct instruction, followed by Wendy, and then Beth. (2) All three mothers made requests for names. These took the following forms: (a) Say X and What-question, alone or in combination; (b) That X (or There X, LookX, etc.) and What-question, alone or in combination. Amy's mother preferred (a); Beth's mother preferred (b); Wendy's mother used both. (3) All three children responded at a very high rate to their

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mothers' requests for names (Amy .94; Wendy .94; Beth, .93). Moreover, the majority of their responses were correct (Amy, .85; Wendy, .74; Beth, .67). (4) Only Amy requested names from her mother, and only Wendy and Beth volunteered names to their mothers, but all three mothers responded at a high rate (Marlene, .97; Liz, .95; Nora, .81). (5) Only for Amy and Marlene were there sufficient data to permit analysis of developmental trends. Over the first six samples, the form of Marlene s requests for names changed from predominantly Say X to predominantly What-questions. During this time Amy consistently achieved a high level of correct naming even though her mother offered fewer and fewer names for imitation. By sample VI Amy not only responded correctly, with minimal help, to her mothers What-questions, but addressed What-questions to her mother. LEARNING FROM NAMING SEQUENCES

What did Amy, Wendy, and Beth learn from participating in naming sequences? The first hypothesis that comes to mind is that these interactions provided opportunities to practice vocabulary. Certain names that were elicited during naming sequences were unusual— "otter," "ewe," and "trombone," for example—words that the children probably did not encounter except in this particular context. Others, such as names of familiar people and objects, were heard by the children many times a day in various contexts. One of the results of the developmental analysis of Amy's responses to her mother s requests for names was that Amy consistently achieved a high level of correct naming even though her mother gave her fewer and fewer names to imitate. In other words, Amy improved in her ability to produce the correct name without her mother s support. However, we do not know whether this means (1) that Amy's vocabulary increased; (2) that Amy improved in her ability to produce the appropriate word in response to her mother s What-question; or (3) both of these. The second possibility is plausible in light of the findings of Bloom, Rocissano, and Hood (1976). They examined adult-child discourse in order to explore the question of how children use the information from adult sentences to form contingent responses. A contingent response was defined as one that shared the same topic and added new information relative to the adult utterance. Bloom, Rocissano, and Hood reported that contingent speech increased developmentally during the third year of life for four middle-class children. Of particular relevance to the present study was the find-

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96 Direct Instruction ing that linguistically contingent responses increased most. These were responses that expanded the verb relation of the adult utterance by adding or replacing constituents within a clause. Responses to What-questions would fall into this category. They found also that linguistically contingent speech occurred more frequently in response to questions than to nonquestions. Naming sequences seem particularly well designed to highlight the function of What-questions and to assist the child in producing contingent responses. In the early samples Marlene relied mainly on the form Say X. But she also occasionally paired Say X with What-questions. That is, she moved away from soliciting imitations to asking What-questions, all within the context of frequently occurring, well-established routines. Meanwhile Amy had not only achieved a high level of correct responding. She had also learned that the name of the referent was the appropriate response in these situations. When her mother inserted the new form (What-question) into an old frame, Amy knew that the name of the referent was called for. The data from the other mother-child pairs were insufficient to permit developmental analyses. However, Wendy's and Beth's naming sequences shared several features with Amy's. Naming sequences occurred repeatedly. Whether mothers requested names or responded to names volunteered by the children, they used the forms Say X (or ThatX) and What-questions, alone or in combination. Also, the children responded at a high rate to requests for names, and most of their responses were correct. The children began to ask What-questions in the later samples. Fitting this development into the emerging picture of Amy's progressive mastery of naming, we see that she began to ask Whatquestions at a time (sample VI) when she was able to respond appropriately—and with minimal help—to her mother's Whatquestions. Some of the What-questions that Amy and Beth asked seemed to be requests for unknown names. But in a few cases they correctly answered their own queries. The data here are thin, indeed, but the phenomenon is an interesting one. It raises the question of why a child would bother to ask a question to which she already knows the answer. Yet this is precisely what caregivers did in naming sequences: they asked tutorial questions, questions to which they knew the answers. Given the reciprocal role relations of naming sequences, one might suppose that the children would first learn to ask questions about old (known) information before learning to ask questions about new (unknown) information. This prediction

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would also be supported by the presumed cognitive complexity of producing questions that are genuinely information-seeking. There is another way of looking at the children's behavior. Perhaps in answering their own questions they were making a final "check" of their understanding. In this way they assured themselves, "Yes, this is how What-questions work." So far we have looked forward, attempting to sketch out advances in the children's understanding of naming. It is also important to glance backward at earlier developments. Here I anticipate one of the results of the analysis of semantic/syntactic relations (Chapter 5). The category of Existence was found to be productive in the first sample for all three children. This category—called Nomination by Brown (1973)—included utterances such as "3 bear," "this cup," and "that a cat." That is, from the beginning of the study the children were able to name spontaneously. It appears, then, that they progressed from spontaneous naming, to responding appropriately to requests for names, and, finally, to making requests for names. This is analogous to the sequence of development that Hood and Bloom (1979) reported for expressions of causality. They found that young children produced spontaneous causal statements before they gave responses to causal questions, and, later still, they asked causal questions. To reiterate, naming sequences in which the child was invited to produce a n a m e in response to a request occurred at a time when the children were also naming spontaneously. Unfortunately, we do not know when naming sequences began. But it is likely that some form of cooperative naming started much earlier. This hypothesis is supported by McConochie s (1976) finding that infants from South Baltimore participated in simple reciprocal games at an early age. The first recorded instance for Amy occurred at sixteen weeks of age. Naming sequences may be a natural outgrowth of these earlier ritualized interactions. This hypothetical sketch of early developments in naming is compatible with other accounts of the origins of linguistic reference. According to Brown (1958): At least two people are required: one who knows the language (the tutor) and one who is learning (the player). In outline form the movements of the game are very simple. The tutor names things in accordance with the semantic custom of his community. The player forms hypotheses about the categorial nature of the things named. He tests his hypotheses by trying to name new things correctly. The tutor compares the

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98 Direct Instruction player s utterances with his own anticipations of such utterances and, in this way, checks the accuracy of fit between his own categories and those of the player. He improves the fit by correction, (p. 194) More recently Ninio and Bruner (1978) showed that learning how to n a m e is dependent upon the child's prior mastery of the rules of reciprocal discourse. In other words, in order to play "the original word game," one needs to know how to take turns in conversation. Ninio and Bruner focused on a particular type of naming sequence—labeling in the context of joint book reading. A single middle-class mother and her infant were followed during the period from eight to eighteen months of age. From the very beginning joint book reading between Richard and his mother was conversational in structure. "The most striking characteristic of labelling activity is that it takes place in a structured interactional sequence that has the texture of a dialogue" (p. 5). The mother used a very limited set of utterance types: attentional vocative (Look), query (What's that?), label (It's an X), and feedback (Yes). These forms are very similar to those used by the mothers of Amy, Wendy, and Beth. Ninio and Bruner reported that the words and intonation of these key utterances did not change over the course of the study. However, there were other important developmental changes. Richard began to participate more actively by pointing, smiling, searching. His vocalizations increased. In his fourteenth month he began to produce lexical labels. Corresponding to these changes were closely calibrated changes in the kinds of abilities and intentions that mother imputed to Richard. Initially she treated his babbles as attempts at labeling. But once Richard started producing actual words, her criterion became more stringent: she responded to babbles with What-questions, requiring that he produce a name. The authors said, " . . . it is possible to regard the mother as coaxing the child to substitute, first, a vocalization for a non-vocal signal and later a well-formed word or word approximation for a babbled vocalization, using appropriate turns in the labelling routine to make her demands" (p. 11). The present study takes up from here. By the time I began to visit Amy, Wendy, and Beth they were already producing lexical labels and were learning to respond appropriately to Whatquestions. Within the context of naming routines a child who was not yet able to answer correctly on her own was enabled to do so through the support of others. Rewards for participation were

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high—the intrinsic reward of mastering the task, the intrinsic reward of interacting with the tutor, and specific expressions of approval from the tutor. As the child gradually learned to respond appropriately, the tutor gradually revised her expectations: she no longer "gave" the l^bel, but required that the child respond unassisted to What-questions. Eventually the child was able to respond appropriately on her own and to make her own requests for names. Knowing how to ask for names better equips the child to learn about the world. This is the mathetic function of language, as defined by Halliday (1974,1975). Eventually, Amy, Wendy, and Beth will be able to offer what they have learned to uninformed listeners. That is, they will develop the ability to become tutors themselves. The picture that emerges here is relevant to issues raised by students of language input. Both Snow (1977&) and Cross (1977) concluded their papers by calling for studies of what children learn about language in specific interactions. Cross said that we should ask "how much of the input can be described in terms of learning situations in which specific linguistic acquisitions may take place" (p. 182). What I have tried to show in this detailed analysis is that Amy, Wendy, and Beth were learning the function of What-questions within the context of naming sequences—a particular type of recurring interaction. Moreover, in the one case in which a developmental analysis was undertaken, the mother's input was observed to be well-adapted to the child's increased level of understanding about naming. Speaking Appropriately In this type of interaction a speaker drew the child into conversation or assisted her in maintaining her end of the conversation by helping her to make an appropriate verbal contribution. Interactions were both dyadic and triadic. Although Amy received more direct instruction about appropriate speech than did Wendy and Beth, this type of interaction accounted for similar proportions of each child's total instructional sequences: .19 for Amy, .22 for Wendy, and .18 for Beth. The children were taught to perform various speech acts that, broadly speaking, fell into the subcategories of compliance and self-assertion. COMPLIANCE

Within the subcategory of compliance one highly ritualized type of conversation involved polite forms, such as thank you, excuse me,

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100 Direct Instruction I'm sorry, and please. All three of the children were instructed by their mothers to behave politely. For example, when Beth bit her mother during a playful tussle, Nora demanded an apology: "Say you're sorry." "Sorry." (BETH IV; 26:26). Another example involved Wendy, her mother, and her mother's friend, Barb, who had just given Wendy a piece of candy: W eating candy.

WENDY

W pauses.

umf /

W turns toward B. W smiles. W walks away.

thank you/ thank you/

OTHER SPEAKERS Mother: Say "thank you." Mother: Tell her [Barb], say "thank you." Barb: You're welcome. (WENDY II; 24:20)

Consider also the following exchange which occurred after Amy burped: M pats As chest. A touches her throat. A touches her throat again.

AMY

MARLENE (mother) Oh, what do you say?

thank you/ excuse me/

No, excuse me. Excuse me. Yeah. (AMY IV; 20:26)

Amy's error is interesting. It shows that although she was unable to produce the correct form, she did know that a polite form was needed. In other words, her response was not random, revealing that she understood that certain kinds of situations require polite responses. In addition to polite behaviors, the children were instructed to perform other speech acts that involved compliant behavior: To obey (Beth wants her mother to pour some more water into a small bottle.)

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101

NORA (mother) You can't have it if you're gonna spill it. You gonna spill it?

yes/ You're supposed to say

B fiddles with cap to bottle.

no/ Say "No, I'm not gonna spill it this time."

B shakes head.

no won't spill time/ You sure?

B still fiddling with cap. N leaves room to get water.

yes/ Stay right here. I'll go get it. (BETH VI; 28:07)

To draw attention to good conduct (Mother has directed Wendy to clean up some cookie crumbs; Mother's friend Barb looks on.) WENDY BARB W wipes floor with tissue, cookie in other hand. W deposits tissue in waste basket. clean up/ W eats cookie. Say "I'm a good girl." W still eating cookie. I a good girl/ (WENDY II; 24:20) To offer (Wendy has just offered her mother some candy from her bag.) WENDY OTHER SPEAKERS Mother: Go ask Peggy and Terry [video asst.] if she wants some candy, if they want some candy.

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102 Direct Instruction W approaches T.

want some | /

W gives candy to P.

here/

Terry: No thank you, Wendy. Peggy: Thank you. (WENDY IV; 26:02)

ASSERTION

In still other conversations caregivers taught the children to perform speech acts that involved self-assertion: To assert one's claim to an object (Amy and her cousin Kris are vying for my doll.) MARLENE (mother) AMY A crying. Oh, what did she [Kris] do? M takes doll from K. ---/ M places doll in her my baby/ lap; A stands beside M. Tell her [Kris], say "keep off." A watches M wrap keep off/ doll in blanket. keep off/ Say "you hurt it." you hurt it/ A crying. ---/ A swats at K. keep off/ A moves closer to M. my baby/ (AMY VII; 23:02) To dispute M picks up A and holds her on lap. A sits on Ms lap, smiling. A struggles to free self from Ms grip.

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AMY no/

MARLENE (mother) Are you bad? No? Yes you are.

no/ Say "huh uh."

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A still struggling.

huh uh/

To threaten A poised by sofa, about to climb on, looking at Grandmother.

AMY

A crawling onto sofa next to M.

take a nap, Kris/

A standing next to M.

punished/

103

Ah huh. (AMY III; 20:05) OTHER SPEAKERS Grandmother tp cousin Kris: You better get upstairs and take a nap or your mother said if you don't take one you get two more days [of punishment] now. Mother to Amy: Say "You'll be punished." (AMY VII; 23:02)

To show off (Mother has been urging Beth to eat some greens.) OTHER SPEAKERS BETH Mother: Here, take a bite. Get muscles. Let me see your muscles. B raises right arm and (laughs) shows muscle. Mother: Where's your muscles? B shows muscle. (laughs) Peggy: Muscles. Mother: Say "See, Peggy, I got muscles.1 B shows muscle to P. see em, Peggy t / Peggy: Muscle. You have a big muscle. (BETH III; 26:04)

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104 Direct Instruction To request an action AMY

MARLENE (mother) You w a n t a piece of gum?

yeah gum/ Here, give Krissie money. Tell her to get you a thing of gum. A looks at K. A looks back at M.

gum/ piece a gum/ (AMY VII; 23:02)

All three children were taught to make requests for actions, b u t there was variation across the families with respect to the other types of assertive speech acts. For example, only Amy received direct instruction in asserting her claim to objects. However, the other children were not unfamiliar with this speech act, as they were observed performing such acts in other contexts. As mentioned earlier, Beth frequently asserted her claims to objects in response to mock challenges from her mother. In assessing what the children learned from direct instruction in conversation, it is important to keep in mind that the interactions were both verbal and nonverbal. Instructions in what to say were sometimes accompanied by instructions in what to do. For example, Beth was instructed to show her muscle and to say, "See, Peggy, I got muscles." When Wendy's mother said, "Go ask Peggy and Terry if they want some candy," Wendy interpreted this as requiring both a verbal response ("want some f ") and a nonverbal one (offering candy). In other cases, the adult gave only a verbal instruction but the child responded both verbally and nonverbally. Wendy said "Thank you" and smiled. Amy said "Keep off" and swatted at Kris. It appears, then, that the children were learning (1) that it is important to talk and act compliantly in some situations and assertively in others; and (2) how to do so appropriately. Because this category has not been examined developmentally, it is not yet possible to suggest further hypotheses. But one can be sure that the children were learning not just through direct instruction but through observation, modeling, play, and various kinds of language socialization strategies. What is needed is a developmental analysis of interactions in which the children showed off, offered, asserted their claims to objects, behaved politely, and so on. This would include in-depth descriptions of teasing routines in

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Direct Instruction 105 which Nora pretended to challenge Beth s claims to objects and of the battles of will between Wendy and Liz. It would also include an inquiry into how the children learned to defend themselves, an ability that all the mothers valued. Such an analysis would lead to a better understanding of the norms of language use that the children were acquiring.

Speaking Appropriately to Dolls Like many two-year-olds in our culture, Amy, Wendy, and Beth played with dolls. Often the mothers joined in the pretense, encouraging the child to behave toward the "baby" much as they themselves behaved toward the child. For example, Marlene urged Amy to comfort the baby. "Aw. The baby's cryin. Pat the baby. Pat the baby." Liz and Wendy put a tired baby to sleep, "She's layin in the truck. Look. The baby's asleep." Nora gave Beth a long lesson in burping. "Burp it. Burp the baby. Burp the baby. Like this. Burp her. Put her on your shoulder and burp her. Go on, how you do Kathryn [Beth's infant cousin]. Burp her. She had enough. Burp her . . . Okay. You're pokin her eyeballs out. You ain't watchin my kid!" The mothers encouraged their daughters to change the baby, comb her hair, take her for a ride in the stroller, give her a kiss, dance with her, and show her a toy. In short, the mothers gave instruction in mothering. Noras analogy between burping the doll and burping a real infant and her complaint against Beth, "You ain't watchin my kid!" show that at least some suggestions for pretend play with dolls were explicitly regarded as applicable to real babies. GENERAL DESCRIPTION

The mothers also instructed the children in appropriate speech to dolls. These conversations represent a special case of the triadic interactions described in the preceding section. Once more a caregiver assists the child in making a verbal contribution, but this time the words are directed to a pretend baby rather than a real person. In the following example Amy and her mother encourage the baby to eat:

A feeds chip to doll. A looks at M.

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AMY

MARLENE (mother)

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106 Direct Instruction What are you doin?

A moves toward coffee table and back to doll.

Give the baby some? Give the baby some? A feeds doll again. Tell her, say "bite." A still feeding doll.

baby bite/ Yeah. Say "take a bite."

A moves about. A feeds doll again.

mommy/

A still feeding doll.

no bite/

What? Say "chew it up." Tell the baby. Say "chew it up."

A begins to move away.

bite/

A peers ihto cup.

chew up/

Yeah. Say "chew it up." (AMY I; 18:22)

In this example Marlene initiated a conversation about an activity that Amy was already (silently) engaged in. In the next example Marlene again follows Amy's lead, but this time Amy herself introduces the topic "fat" and Marlene builds upon it, offering playful words and pinchings. AMY A pats doll. A presses doll's face. A shows doll to M.

MARLENE (mother)

oh mommy/ mommy/ mommy/

A places doll on M s lap. What? A touches doll, smiling.

fat/ Fat. Yeah. fat/

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Direct Instruction 107 A still touching doll, smiling. M pinches doll's cheek. M puts doll into As lap. A touches doll. A throws doll back onto Ms lap* M pinches doll's cheek. A hits doll's face, smiling. A takes another swat at doll. A swats again.

look fat/ Go like this, say "oh you fat little thing." you fat thing/ mm/ doll/ fat thing/

Say "you fat little thing." Say "you thizzy."

thizzy/ thizzy/

(AMY III; 20:05)

This conversation continues through several more turns in which Marlene attempts to elicit "you little firdy" and "fatso." On other occasions Marlene instructed Amy to say, for example, "sit down, baby," "here baby," "look baby," "be good," "what's your name?" and "dirty baby." Most frequently, Marlene offered the line "don't cry," which will be discussed more fully below. Altogether Amy participated in eleven interactions in which she received direct instructions in talking to babies. This compared with four such interactions for Wendy and five for Beth. Wendy was told to sing to the baby, to feed her, and to apologize for hurting her. In the following example Wendy has sought her mother's help in wrapping the baby in a blanket:

L fixes blanket around doll. W moves around L's chair. W approaches other toys.

WENDY

LIZ (mother) Tell the baby it's cold outside.

outside/ cold/

(WENDY I; 23:29)

Beth was taught to talk to the baby, to exclaim over her prettiness, and to show her a picture:

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108 Direct Instruction M gives photo to B.

BETH

•

-

-

/

Peggy: Huh? Mother: Not her. Over here. Come over here and play. Peggy: Yeah.

B shows photo to P.

B still showing photo to P. B squats. B holds photo in front of doll's face, addressing doll. B lays doll on floor. B touches doll. B holds doll on knee, holding photo in front of doll's face.

OTHER SPEAKERS Mother: Oh, here. Here. Here's a picture. Look at the picture. Show the baby the picture. Go over there and show the baby the picture. Tell her all about the picture.

oh/ see/

Mother: Sit down and teach the baby.

baby/ ---/ baby/ talk the baby/ dress/ (BETH II; 25:23)

This example is particularly interesting in that Nora tells Beth to teach the baby. Here again—embodied this time in suggestions for symbolic play—is the notion that taking care of children involves teaching them. In the above examples the mothers helped their young daughters to enact the behaviors of the mothering role. By behaving like mothers in relation to dolls, the children were learning about the caregiver-child relationship. They were learning to talk about and minister to the physical needs of babies and to play with, entertain, teach, and comfort both verbally and nonverbally. Of course, Amy, Wendy, and Beth had many other opportunities

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to find out about mothering. They watched, listened to, and imitated the people who took care of them—their mothers and also grandmothers, Amy's aunts and uncles, Wendy's mothers friends, Beth's grandfather. Direct instruction complemented these other ways of learning. Through direct instruction the mothers singled out certain matters as particularly important and demonstrated to the children appropriate caregiving speech and behavior. From this vantage point, the mothers appear as cultural agents who transmit a particular social role to their daughters. Taking another perspective, we see the mother and child as co-players. The mothers provided models of how to play with dolls. Drawing upon important cultural knowledge, they helped the children to create conventional scenarios involving "babies." This fits well with recent accounts of the development of play in young children. Garvey (1977) proposed that play emerges naturally as an outgrowth of cognitive and physical development—provided that the young child is exposed to models who treat objects in a nonliteral way. From these models the child derives a playful, as if orientation which eventually generalizes, enabling the child to create original scenarios. In a study of two-year-olds from middle-class backgrounds, Rocissano (1979) concluded, "Learning to use objects as they are conventionally used, rather than on the basis of their physical characteristics, was seen as a first and an important step toward the liberation of action from the purely physical constraints of context" (p. 124). As Amy, Wendy, and Beth and their mothers played with dolls, the children were learning the culturally defined functions of dolls, bottles, blankets, spoons, potty chairs. This was a prerequisite to more inventive play in which dolls become ghosts or monsters and bottles become cigarettes or giraffes. Beth, whose mother was a highly imaginative player, was already creating more original dramas, in which dolls were movie stars or hospital patients. She transformed the coffee table into a stove, a store. My audio tapes became cameras, my nesting bowls became pots, spoons, and hats. EXPRESSIONS OF CONCERN

As already pointed out, "don't cry" was the line that Amy's mother offered most frequently—but not frequently enough for a quantitative analysis, I have attempted, therefore, a speculative and admittedly preliminary account of Amy's development of expressions of concern. Attempts to elicit "don't cry" occurred, with one exception, only in the first sample. This line was embedded in a distinctive

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110 Direct Instruction context of paralinguistic and nonverbal cues: sympathetic tone of voice, particularly on the word aw; and holding, hugging, patting, and/or kissing the doll. For example: A walks toward M, carrying doll.

AMY cries f /

cryf/ A holds doll against her shoulder. A holding doll.

cry/

M pulls A to her. M pats doll with As left hand. A smiles. A holds doll up in front of face. A hugs doll. A walks away. A holds doll up in front of face.

MARLENE (mother) What? Oh, the baby's cryin. Pat the baby. Pat the baby. Yeah. Pat him. Do like this. Here.

Do like this. Say "aw don't cry." um cries/ bye/ cry|/

Say "don't cry." (AMY I; 18:22)

Two interesting features characterize this interaction. First, Amy herself introduced the theme of crying by taking the doll to hei4 mother and saying "Cries." Amy introduced this theme in two other long interactions with her mother in the first sample. This shows that Amy already knew that crying is an appropriate theme of conversation about babies. Second, it appears that Amy had not fully mastered the constellation of appropriate comforting behaviors—at least not to her mother's satisfaction. Marlene helped her to express concern nonverbally by demonstrating how to pat. In later samples Amy seemed to develop further along these

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two lines. In the third sample she initiated the following conversation with her mother: AMY

MARLENE (mother)

A approaches M, a r m s outstretched. A hugs M. aw/ A points to doll. A picks up doll. A hugs doll, smiling.

baby cryin aw/ aw/ aw m m / (AMY III; 20:05)

Here Amy has clearly mastered all three related expressions of concern: the verbal ("Baby cryin, aw"), the paralinguistic (sympathetic tone), and the nortlinguistic (hugging). Beginning in the fourth sample Amy introduced the theme of a crying baby in conversations with people other than her mother. For example, she placed the doll in my lap and said, "Hold baby. Hold baby. Baby cry" (Amy IV; 20: 26). There were a total of four such conversations with other people, and none of them included the highly emotional cues (e.g., aw, kissing) which, perhaps were reserved for interactions between Amy, mommy, and the "baby." (On one occasion Amy seemed to be engaging the doll in conversation. She said, "Pat you on the head. Oh, baby. My baby cry. Baby cry. Come on, baby. Come on, baby" [Amy VI]. Unfortunately, her accompanying nonverbal behaviors were not visible on tape owing to a technical problem.) To summarize, in the first sample Amy introduced the theme of crying in conversation with her mother but had not yet mastered the various expressions of concern. Later, she Was able to spontaneously express concern verbally and nonverbally and to introduce the theme of crying in conversations with speakers other than her mother. In other words, Amy learned how to express concern in various ways and how to engage others in conversation about crying babies. However, this analysis still leaves us with the question of how direct instruction per se helped Amy to learn. What is the function of "Say 'don't cry'" in the early conversations between Amy and Marlene? One possibility is that attempts to elicit imitations are just another way of drawing attention to crying as an appropriate

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112 Direct Instruction theme of conversation about babies. But in the first sample Amy already introduced this theme, at least in conversatibns with her mother. It seems more likely that Marlene seized the opportunity afforded by Amy's expressed interest in a crying baby to give another demonstration in the expression of concern, I am suggesting that "Say 'don't cry'" was a kind of demonstration of what to say, just as moving Amy's hand through the motion of patting was a demonstration of what to do. It is possible that demonstration as a heuristic device was particularly appropriate at this time—when Amy was still in the process of mastering the full constellation of expressions of concern. Later, however, after Amy had shown that she knew how to express concern verbally and nonverbally and could engage other speakers in conversation about crying babies, Marlene no longer attempted to elicit imitations. Instead she used a much more subtle, indirect teaching strategy. For example: AMY A sitting next to M, covers doll with blanket. Ms tone is stern, mildly threatening. A arranges doll in lap, settling herself in chair. A still arranging doll in lap. Ms tone is sympathetic, especially on "cry." A looks at doll. A lifts up corner of blanket, looks at M.

no-oh/

Throw that baby on the floor.

Why? cause/ Make the baby cry? no-oh/ baby/ there baby/

A pats doll. A shakes head.

no sleep/

A pats doll. A picks up doll.

ah/

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MARLENE (mother)

Baby goin to sleep? Mm.

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Direct Instruction A places doll on M s lap.

113

here mommy/ here/ Thank you.

M wraps blanket around doll. M holds doll against shoulder, patting it.

baby here/ goin to sleep/ (AMY V; 21:17)

Here Marlene proposes a violation of acceptable treatment of babies ("Throw that baby on the floor"). Although her tone is mildly threatening, she clearly has no intention of actually carrying out her proposal—and Amy knows this. She continues to go about her business quite matter-of-factly, settling back in the chair, arranging the doll in her lap, making no efforts to protect the baby from imminent h a r m . Marlene is not issuing a real threat. She is teasing Amy, "testing" her knowledge about proper care of babies. Amy correctly rejects her m o t h e r s proposal with a firm, "no-oh." When Marlene asks "Why?" Amy gives the stereotype, "cause," but is unable to say why such treatment is unacceptable. Marlene supplies the reason: it will make the baby cry. Amy's next response is revealing, another "no-oh" with the same intonational contour as the previous no. This indicates that Amy misinterpreted what her mother meant by "Make the baby cry?" Amy rejected what she regarded as another unacceptable proposal from her mother. But Marlene intended something different this time, as indicated by the sympathetic tone of her voice. She was agreeing with Amy that one doesn't throw babies on the floor and was explaining the reason why. The remainder of the interaction shows even more convincingly that Amy did not regard any of her mother's utterances as real threats. Rather, she took this to be a situation in which she was expected to express concern for the baby. She patted the baby herself and then took it to her own mother for comforting. This example illustrates that Amy, at only twenty-one months of age, was already capable of engaging in highly complex and subtle communications with her mother about babies. In the present study we have no observations of the children expressing concern to real infants. Amy was the youngest child in her family, as was Wendy. Beth's sister was born during the final weeks of the study. But one can readily imagine triadic interac-

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114 Direct Instruction tions in which a mother instructs a two-year-old in the proper care of a real baby. Schieffelin (1978, 1979&) reported that interactions of this sort occurred routinely among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Mothers appealed to girls as young as two years of age to "feel sorry for" a youjiger child and to attend to his or her needs. They were told how to act—rto share or give to the infant, to nurture, to be with him or her. Equally important were the paralinguistic cues which accompanied the mothers' messages and conveyed to the little girls that one feels compassion and sympathy for infants. Rhyming, Singing, and Playing Verbal Games So far we have examined interactions in which Amy, Wendy, and Beth received direct instruction in naming people and things and in speaking appropriately to others. Still other interactions provided opportunities for the children to rehearse rhymes, songs, and verbal games. Once again, Amy received more direct instruction than Wendy and Beth, and the difference here was dramatic: Amy participated in twenty-six interactions, compared with two for Wendy and four for Beth. During the third sample Amy and her mother recited two of their favorite rhymes: AMY M guides A through the accompanying gestures.

MARLENE (mother) Say "Pattycake, pattycake, baker s man. Bake me a cake as fast as you can. Roll it. Pat it. Mark it with an A, and put it in the oven for Amy." Went around the world. Say "I went around the world. Shot me a bear."

A sitting on M s lap, poking at M's belly, looking at M.

bear/ Guess where I shot him at? on/

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Direct Instruction

A continues to poke at Ms belly, looking at M. M pokes As belly. A pokes at Ms belly. A still poking at Ms belly.

M pokes As belly.

Right inthere/ shoot a 00/ shot a bear/

there/

115

.

There! Okay. Say it. Went around the world. Guess where I shot him at? Right in there. (AMY III; 20:05)

In the "Shot me a bear" rhyme there is a progressive shift in the way the task is framed. It starts out as an elicited imitation task, with Amy repeating "bear." Marlene then asks a question, followed by an incomplete sentence. Amy fills in the blank, "there." Eventually the task evolves into reciprocal recitation as mother and child trade lines: "Okay. Say it. Went around the world." "Shot a bear." "Guess where I shot him at?" "There." Marlene and Amy also did "This little piggy went to market," "The eensy, teensy spider," "Happy birthday," and the secret game: M cups chin in her hands and draws Amy's mouth close to her own.

AMY

(laughs)

A whispers in Ms ear. M whispers to A.

hello/

A speaks into Ms ear.

hello/

A speaks into M's ear. M speaks with her mouth over As mouth.

hello/

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MARLENE (mother) Here, let me talk to you. Go like this. Say "hello." Tell me a secret. Hello. Tell me a secret Tell me a secret. Hello. Hello. Hello.

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116 Direct Instruction A standing next to M.

(laughs) Hello. hello/ You tell me one.

A still standing next to M.

hello/

A speaks into Ms ear.

hello/

Tell me a secret.

A puts her mouth against Ms mouth. M kisses A. M speaks into A's ear. A points to J. A whispers into Ms ear. A puts her mouth to Ms mouth.

Hello. Hello. (laughs) hello/ Say "sss . . ." Judy/

Allright. Now you tell me one.

mm/ Say "sss . . ." (AMY III; 20:05)

Amy participated enthusiastically in these interactions and Marlene sometimes initiated a verbal game or recitation as a way of distracting Amy from some undesirable behavior. In the later samples (IV, VI, a n d VII) Amy tried to recite "Pattycake" while playing with her cousin Kris and her eight-year-old Aunt Judy. On a few occasions Wendy tried to recite "Pattycake" and "Eeny, meeny, miny, m o " as she played alone or with her friend Joy. I did not observe any instance in which Wendy received direct instructions in these rhymes. Liz did, however, teach Wendy to dance and sing "doot doot doot doot doot." And Wendy's grandmother reported that she taught her to say the prayer "Now I lay me down to sleep." Nora encouraged Beth to say "Eeny, meeny, miny, m o " a n d "Trick or treat" after her cousin Lori h a d recited them. On another occasion she told Beth to sing "Get up and boogie" and "Shake your bootie." The interactions described in this section afforded opportunities for the children to engage in cooperative verbal play a n d to appreciate sounds and rhythms. Each of the children recited at least one rhyme alone or with an older child, indicating that they were,

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Direct Instruction 117 in fact, committing the rhymes to memory. Rhymes, songs, and verbal games provided a resource that the children could use in play with other children. The most striking example involved Beth and her five-year-old cousin Lori, who improvised a playful routine in which they took turns inventing lines: L claps hands. B, lying on coffee table, sits up and claps hands. L sings, holding B s hands. They swing their arms back and forth. B ceases swinging momentarily. B swings arms again, singing. B and L approach mike. L speaks into mike. B puts ear to mike. B leans over mike, speaks into it. B speaks into mike again. L speaks into mike. B speaks into mike. B sits up, smiles. B leans over again and speaks into mike. L leans very close to mike and screams. L stands up and dances away. B leans over again and speaks into mike.

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BETH

shake a boogie!/

(laughs) hello/ hello/

LORI

Shake your boogie! Hello in there!

hello/ hello my kitty cat/ hello/

Hello sweetheart!

Hello sugar roll, You like to see my Nora boyfriend!

yea boyfriend!/ OK. Get ready. Get on my back.

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118 Direct Instruction B sits up, looking at L. (L begins to talk to Nora.) B, smiling, begins clapping hands and swinging arms, still looking at L.

yeah/ yeah ah ah/ mm mm/ (BETH V; 27:15)

Using Correct Grammar, Pronunciation, and Intonation Direct instruction in grammar, pronunciation, and intonation occurred infrequently. There were no such interactions for Wendy. Amy participated in three, all of which occurred in the first sample and involved calling intonation. For example: A touching cup; Grandmom not present. As utterance marked by calling intonation. A turns toward M.

AMY

MARLENE (mother) Call Grandmom.

Mo-om/

Mamom

Say "Grandmom." Mamom, yeah. (AMY I; 18:22)

Beth participated in nine interactions in which her mother corrected her grammar or pronunciation, as in the following examples: B gives doll and blanket to N.

N wraps doll in blanket.

BETH cover mm this f /

(laughs)

NORA (mother) Okay. I'll cover this. Say "cover the baby." (BETH I; 25:09)

Also:

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Direct Instruction

B sitting next to N on sofa.

BETH hey hey/

B speaks indistinctly.

ice cream/

B speaks indistinctly.

ice cream/

B improves slightly. N enunciates loudly.

ice cream/

119

NORA Huh? What? Say it right. Ice cream. (BETH I; 25:09)

Most of Nora's corrections of g r a m m a r and pronunciation also occurred in the first sample, perhaps in reaction to my presence. That there were few instances of direct instruction in g r a m m a r is consistent with B r o w n s (1973) conclusion that parents seem to pay very little attention to the syntactic errors of their young children. He added that parents tend to correct pronunciation and "bad" words. While the mothers in the present study said that they were concerned about these aspects of their children's speech and described instances in which they made corrections, very few cases were recorded. Counting, Reciting the Alphabet, Identifying Colors Included in this category, which occurred very infrequently, were interactions in which the child received direct instruction in counting, reciting the alphabet, giving her age, and identifying colors. These, being more advanced content areas, were not yet the focus of the mothers' teaching efforts. Only Wendy engaged in more than two such interactions. The following example occurred in the second sample: WENDY W sitting on motorcycle.

LIZ (mother) Say your ABC's. Say "A."

A/ B. B/ C.

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120 Direct Instruction W still sitting on motorcycle.

C/ C.

(WENDY II; 24:20)

Other In addition to the interactions already described there were several instances of direct instruction which could not be easily classified. For example, instructions to say "yeah!" or "wheel" while playing ball were included here, as was Nora's prohibition of a taboo word —"Not 'piss,' you say 'pee.'" Other Studies of Direct Instruction Schieffelin (1979a, 1979&) found that the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea routinely used a teaching strategy that resembles direct instruction. Kaluli speakers, like the mothers in the present study, believed that young children need to be taught to speak. Once children said certain words which marked them as novice speakers, adults and older children began to teach them what to say in conversation. Teaching interactions were not limited to single turns but included long sequences of connected utterances. A specific instructional form was used: the speaker offered the child a message, followed by the word e/eraa ("say like this/that"). This form is similar to Say X in the present study, except that the order is reversed (message + e/eraa = X Say). Schieffelin found that mothers and other caregivers used sterna in both dyadic and triadic interactions with three two-year-old children—Abi, Meli, and Wanu. Triadic interactions predominated, representing the majority of "prompted" interactions for each of the children. This contrasts with the present study in which triadic interactions were in the minority (Amy, .20; Wendy, .21; Beth, .15). Two of the Kaluli children had older siblings, and all three lived in extended family dwellings. This meant that a large number of people were routinely available to be drawn into triadic interactions. While Amy, Wendy, and Beth did not have older siblings, they did interact daily with members of their extended families. It is unclear, then, whether the children from South Baltimore had fewer opportunities for triadic interactions or whether differences in the dyadic/triadic distributions reflected differences between the two

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Direct Instruction 111 communities in the kinds of speech deemed important for young children to learn. Schieffelin reported that elema served a variety of functions. In dyadic interactions it was used to initiate and maintain play or games, to instruct the child to make requests, and to correct the form or meaning of a prior utterance. Similar uses applied in triadic interactions. In addition, certain uses of e/ema, such as the elicitation of vocatives, occurred only triadically. Of particular importance were interactions in which mothers taught the children to respond assertively to a third person. In these confrontational routines the children were encouraged to tease, shame, threaten, and challenge claims of ownership. While these functions are reminiscent of those taught in South Baltimore, there was one striking difference. Amy, Wendy, and Beth received far more instruction in naming people and things. Abi, Meli, and Wanu were taught to "call out" to people but received little instruction in naming things. Some of the naming sequences in which children from South Baltimore participated occurred in the course of "reading," an activity which may be thought of as a precursor to literacy. The absence of naming sequences among the Kaluli may be related to the fact that literate events did not take place in that culture. With respect to "calling out" sequences, Schieffelin noted that Kaluli children tended to cooperate even when told to address persons not present and mothers sometimes initiated instruction in vocatives as a way of distracting the child from some undesirable activity. I observed too that children from South Baltimore cooperated, often enthusiastically, with their families' efforts to teach them. They responded at a very high rate to direct instructions of all kinds. They were highly attentive for long periods as mothers named pictures in books or ran through long lists of relatives and friends. Wendy occasionally initiated naming sequences by taking the book to her mother and, later, to me. Amy eventually switched roles with her mother, asking a series of What-questions. The mothers counted on their children's cooperation, and a rare refusal to participate was worthy of comment. "You're a stubborn thing today" (AMY I; 18:22). Like the Kaluli, mothers from South Baltimore sometimes used direct instruction as a way of redirecting the child's activity. Certain instructional sequences were offered as entertainments, ways to revive a fretting child. Marlene used rhymes, songs, and verbal games in this way, and Amy responded with pleasure. In a study of the verbal environments of two-year-old children,

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Direct

Instruction

Holzman (1974) briefly examined the kinds of information that mothers explicitly taught. Two of the mothers were highly educated and two were high school graduates. Mothers' verbalizations were classified according to the content of direct instruction: names of objects, counting, poems, and other (e.g., colors, facts about the natural world). It is unclear exactly how these categories were defined. There was substantial variation in the frequency of the categories, with names of objects being the only type of information that was taught by all of the mothers. In the present study names of people and things represented the largest category of direct instruction for each of the children. Holzman found no social class differences in direct instruction or in other aspects of the verbal environment. Also relevant to the issue of direct instruction is Moerk s (1972) study of mother-child interaction in language learning. Moerk identified a number of "teaching devices" that middle-class American mothers used with their young children (twenty to sixty months of age). These included imitation through expansion, modeling, occasional questions, incomplete sentences, question-answer games, nursery rhymes, and structuring through picture books. Several of these seemed to involve direct instruction, as defined in the present study.8 An examination of the quoted protocols revealed several instances of naming sequences and of corrections of the child's pronunciation. Moerk noted that mothers used incomplete sentences to invite the child to produce the next line in nursery rhymes. This is exactly what Marlene did in the "Shot me a bear" rhyme. The mothers from South Baltimore tended not to use occasional questions. This may be a later teaching device, as all of the protocols quoted by Moerk involved children who were at least three years old. In a subsequent analysis of the same data, Moerk (1976) identified several types of interaction patterns and concluded that the mothers frequently gave instruction in all aspects of language, including syntax and morphology Other findings of interest were reported by Snow, ArlmanRupp, Hassing, Jobse, Joosten, and Vorster (1976), who examined Dutch mothers' speech to two-year-old children. They found that "What is that? " was the question used most frequently by the mothers and that it functioned almost exclusively as a tutorial. The mothers from South Baltimore Used this question in the same way in the 8 Imitation through expansion and modeling were not regarded as types of direct instruction in the present study and therefore were not included in the analysis.

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Direct Instruction 123 context of naming sequences. Snow and her colleagues identified sequences of mothers' utterances which provide "miniature language lessons." Some, as when a mother answered her own Whatquestion, would have been counted as direct instruction in the present study. Snow and her colleagues also made social class comparisons of mothers' speech. The eighteen mothers were equally divided into three social class designations: unskilled and semiskilled working class, skilled lower middle class, and academic middle class. Overall, there were very few social class differences in simplicity or redundancy of mothers' speech. (Apparently the social class groups were not compared with respect to "miniature language lessons.") In the book reading situation no social class differences emerged on any of the thirty-four variables. The authors suggested that "we may have artificially obscured social class differences in the quality of the input available to the children in the course of their normal activities by structuring the testing situation as we did" (p. 18). However, one may ask how mothers from the lower classes would know how to respond to the book reading task were it not a familiar activity to them. All of the families from South Baltimore looked at books with their two-year-old children—even Nora, who could read very little herself. Having reviewed these studies of direct instruction I want to add that direct instruction apparently is not an important language socialization strategy in every community. For example, Ward (1971) reported that mothers from Rosepoint, a black community in rural Louisiana, did not assume the role of language teacher in relation to young children. Any learning drills that occurred—and apparently they occurred infrequently—were conducted by older children. Mothers used a different language socialization strategy in which they routinely repeated, paraphrased, or expanded their own utterances when talking to young children. In sum, Schieffelin s study of the Kaluli is most similar to the present study in topic and approach. Direct instruction was an important issue for the Kaluli themselves, as it was for the three families from South Baltimore. Interactions involving direct instruction served a variety of functions, and some of these were similar for both groups of children. For Kaluli families and families from South Baltimore, direct instruction was a joint undertaking, involving the cooperation of mother, child, and, often, other speakers as well. Other studies indicated that some American and Dutch mothers of different social classes engage in direct instruction. This does not mean that direct instruction occurs in all communities, or

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124 Direct Instruction that it is necessary for lahguage learning. Rather, it is one kind of language socialization Strategy, which may contribute to the child's acquisition of language. Learning from Direct Instruction In preceding sections I considered, in turn, each of the categories of direct instruction, first describing the interactions and then asking what the child learned from that particular category of direct instruction. Here I consider the question of what the children learned from direct instruction in general. What did they learn about language and the social world by participating routinely in instructional interactions? On the broadest level, it appears that Amy, Wendy, and Beth were learning about the caregiver/child relationship. Each was learning that mother knows much more than she knows, that mother wants to share that knowledge with her, and that if she cooperates, she will learn. That is, Amy, Wendy, and Beth were learning that caring for children involves teaching them, that being a child involves learning. Of course, the children learned this lesson in other ways as well. They did a great deal of exploring, thinking, learning on their own. They no doubt noticed that mother could say and do many things that they were not yet able to say and do. They watched and listened and tried to model her behavior. Perhaps they observed other young children being taught by their families. Pretend play with dolls provided still another context in which "babies" were taught by those who cared for them. A particularly telling example occurred when Nora instructed Beth to "teach the baby." One would expect that eventually the children themselves would structure their play around teaching situations. A recorded example of this sort was described in Chapter 3. Amy took the role of the mother in toilet training a doll, as her own mother looked on, amused, but approving. It appears, then, that what the children were learning from direct instruction complemented what they were learning incidentally, as they watched and listened to mothers and babies and as they began to act and speak like mothers in relation to dolls. In all these ways Amy, Wendy, and Beth were learning that teaching is an important part of caring for children. Since direct instruction occurred within the context of verbal interactions, it is likely that the children were also learning how

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to converse. I have already mentioned McConochie's (1976) finding that infants from South Baltimore participated in simple reciprocal games such as "I'm gonna get you" and "Pattycake/' These games provide models of turn-taking in conversation and seem to be precursors of the instructional sequences identified in the present study. Bruner (1975) proposed that mutual, ritualized play of this sort draws the infant's attention to the communicative act itself and to certain structures of action and attention which help the prelinguistic child to understand the formal structures of language. Keenan (1974) pointed out that it is easier for young children to achieve a coherent dialogue within the context of ready-made routines such as rhymes or songs. Instructional interactions may be thought of as routines—highly structured, recurring interactions. These routines facilitate the construction of coherent discourse. The families' attempts to elicit imitations, their prompts, tutorial questions, and directives to ask or tell enabled the children to participate appropriately in a wide variety of conversations. They could n a m e people and things, respond politely to a visitor, dispute with mother, threaten a rival, take care of babies, and join in verbal games. Also relevant to interactions involving direct instruction is Snow's (1977a) account of the development of conversation between mothers and infants. This account was based on a longitudinal study of two middle-class mothers and their babies. Snow proposed that mothers use a conversational model in interacting with their infants (three to eighteen months) and that modifications in the mother's speech reflect the baby's growing ability to take her turn in conversation. A conversational model, according to Snow, involves the assumption of reciprocal communication. She found that the mothers not only tried to communicate specific information to the infant but also tried to receive specific information from her. Even in the earliest samples, when the infants were severely limited in their ability to communicate, the mothers attempted to receive information from them. They talked about the baby's activities a n d focus of attention and repeatedly referred to the child's wishes, needs, and intentions. "The babies' behaviour was never described as r a n d o m . . . . It was seen, just as adult behaviour is seen, as intended and intentional" (p. 14). When the babies were three months old, the mothers responded to burps, smiles, coos, sneezes, etc., as if they were intended to communicate something specific. Since the infants emitted these fairly infrequently, the mothers m a d e repeated efforts to elicit responses. Getting the in-

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126 Direct Instruction fant to take her turn seemed to be the mothers' major goal: their speech was highly repetitive, they used a high frequency of questions (especially tag-questions and Hm?) and they repaired conversational breakdowns by taking the baby's turn. But most relevant to the present study is Snow's description of mother-child interaction in the later samples. By the time the children were eighteen months old (and producing words themselves), the mothers h a d revised their expectations: they now expected not only that the children would take their turn but that they would make appropriate responses. Devices for eliciting appropriate responses included several that were regarded as direct instruction devices in the present study. Mothers solicited the names of people, corrected mislabelings, and elicited polite forms ("What do you say?"). In the interactions described by Snow the mothers seemed to be helping the children to communicate what the mothers inferred they wanted to communicate. This inference was colored by what the mothers regarded as appropriate speech in a particular situation. We end up, then, with an interesting paradox: in her attempt to receive information from a child who is not yet fully capable of giving information, the mother interprets the child's communicative intention, and, in so doing, shapes the child's intention in the direction of her own interpretation. A n u m b e r of students of child language, notably Harris (1975) and Ryan (1974), have argued that this interpretative process is critical to communicative development in young children. Trevarthen (1979) maintained that it is not so much that the mother attributes intentions to apparently meaningless behaviors as that she helps the child to achieve a fuller realization of his or her own intention. He reported that two- and three-month-old infants exhibited a rudimentary ability to communicate intentionally and to respond adaptively to signals from the mother. Although the mothers m a d e adaptations to the infants, there was "innovation of meaning by the infant as well as by the mother" (p. 346). There is no question that Amy, Wendy, and Beth, in their third year of life, were capable of intentional communication. However, we are left with the question of how child and caregiver negotiated meanings. Did the mother help the child to express an intention that originated with the child, or did she insist that the child adjust her intention to the mother's? The answer is that both occurred (to varying degrees) and that both could occur in the course of a single interaction.

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In the vast majority of cases the mother followed the child's lead, helping her to realize an intention that the child was trying to express. The mother surveyed the situation and inferred from the child's speech and nonverbal behavior that she wanted to n a m e a picture, threaten a rival, or thank a friend. In other interactions the mother's plans took precedence over the child's. Amy was otherwise occupied when Marlene began to quiz her about her n a m e and address. This lesson was "disembodied" in the sense that it bore no relation to the present situation or to Amy's direction of attention. It did, however, deal with essential information that Marlene was determined to transmit to Amy. In still other cases, the mother launched an instructional sequence as a way of distracting the child from some undesirable activity. In these situations a naming sequence or a rhyme was offered precisely because it fit the mother's purpose and not the child's. Even though the sequence originated with the mother, it was an effective distraction because it captured and sustained the child's interest, bringing about a realignment of the purposes of child and caregiver. In other words, regardless of who initiated an instructional interaction, meanings were negotiated over and over throughout the interaction. A related question concerns the kinds of intentions that were realized in instructional interactions. While these interactions obviously served a variety of complex ends, in some cases the intention to communicate was paramount, in others, the intention to learn. This can be better understood by reference to familiar examples. Amy is crying because Kris has just taken the doll. Marlene assumes that Amy wants to communicate something to Kris but doesn't know how to do so effectively. She instructs Amy to say "keep off." By helping Amy to articulate her intention (to reassert her claim to the doll), Marlene conveys to Amy how to communicate appropriately in this situation. Consider two other examples, both naming sequences. Wendy and her mother are looking at a book. They come to a picture of an unfamiliar animal. Mother says, "Say 'mole,'" and Wendy replies, "Mole." Beth and her mother are also naming animals. Beth points to a picture of a hen and says, "Duck." Mother replies, "What is that? That's a hen," but then revises her instruction, "Just call it a chicken. That's too hard for you." Do the mothers in these examples assume that the children want to communicate something? It seems more likely that they assume that the children do not know

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128 Direct Instruction the n a m e of the animal but w a n t to learn it. Nora's revised instruction ("Just call it a chicken. That's too hard for you.") indicates that Nora regards this as a language lesson and that she intends to teach information that is appropriate to Beth's developmental level. By helping Beth to realize her intention (to name the animal), Nora demonstrates for Beth how to learn in this situation. In these interactions the mothers and children are engaged in an enterprise that partakes of both cooperation and asymmetry. Child and mother want to communicate with one another. The child is an i m m a t u r e speaker who wants to learn; the mother is a mature speaker who wants to help the child to learn. The child is capable, despite her immaturity, of getting across much of her feeling and intention. The mother, being a mature speaker who knows the child intimately, is capable of apprehending much of the child's meaning. To quite a large degree, they do communicate. Regardless of the particular goal of an interaction—to assert a claim, to n a m e a picture, to recite a rhyme—the child is actively engaged in mastering the local resources of communication and the mother is actively engaged in lending her assistance. This is one way by which young children become acculturated: they develop the feelings, motivations, and intentions that enable them to speak and act like members of the community. Still another issue raised by the phenomenon of direct instruction concerns the function of elicited imitation. The form Say X was used frequently in various categories of direct instruction. In a discussion of elicited imitation in two different cultures, Hood and Schieffelin (1978) made the important point that the Say X-response sequence is only a small part of the total interaction. What is significant in these interactions is that the participants are constructing some form of communication with each other. This principle obviously applies to the results of the present study. When Marlene instructed Amy to say "You'll be punished" to cousin Kris, she was helping Amy to threaten Kris. Amy accepted the proffered line and used it against Kris, saying "Punished." But on another occasion when Marlene instructed Amy, "Say it, 'Went around the w o r l d / " Amy replied, "Shot a bear." Here mother and child constructed a different kind of communication—reciprocal recitation. Instead of repeating her mother's utterance, Amy recited the next line in the rhyme. It appears, then, that if Say X has any general function, it is to signal a learning situation: Say X cues the child that there is something going on here that is important to learn. But what is important to learn in any given case depends upon the broader interactional context in which Say X is embedded.

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Other Issues Related to Direct Instruction One issue that has not yet been broached concerns the finding of individual differences in the frequency of direct instruction. Amy and her family consistently engaged in more interactions of this sort than did the other children and their families. One possible reason for this is that Amy was the youngest of the three children: she was eighteen months old at the beginning of the study, whereas Wendy and Beth were twenty-four and twenty-five months old, respectively. Also, Amy's language was slightly more immature at the outset in terms of MLU and n u m b e r of semantic/syntactic categories that were used productively (see Chapter 5). If direct instruction is a strategy that families used with children whose language is less advanced, one would expect to see a developmental decline in the a m o u n t of direct instruction. Although there was no consistent decline for Amy, the highest frequency of interactions occurred in the first sample and the lowest frequency in the final sample. There were no discernible declines for the other children. However, there was some evidence that one of the direct instruction devices, elicited imitation, was a relatively early teaching device that gave way to What-questions in Amy's naming sequences and to implicit forms of instruction in her expressions of concern to "babies." Also, Beth, who was the most advanced linguistically, participated in teasing routines that involved implicit instruction. This leaves us with several questions: Is direct instruction eventually replaced by other kinds of language socialization strategies? Do caregivers continue to use direct instruction for teaching other (more advanced) kinds of information? Are there, from the beginning, alternative strategies to direct instruction? These questions cannot be answered until other language socialization strategies are examined systematically. It is also possible that variation in frequency of direct instruction reflects more general differences in styles of interacting with children. In the study described earlier, Snow et al. (1976) emphasized the importance of individual differences in the mothers' style of play, in their ability to create interesting and instructive interactions with children. They found that social class alone did not predict these hard-to-measure features of maternal style. In the present study the mothers seemed to vary as to the kinds of situations that inspired their creativity. Beth s mother created elaborate fantasies that were domestic or fanciful in theme (and that usually did not involve direct instruction). Wendy's mother could fascinate with her book reading—not just naming, but commenting, describing,

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130 Direct Instruction retelling the stories. Amy's mother seemed to enjoy various kinds of direct instruction but especially rhymes and verbal games which involved physical as well as verbal play. Marlene s enthusiasm for verbal games was already evident when Amy was an infant (McConochie 1976). Still another possibility needs to be considered. Perhaps the families differed in the degree to which they were influenced by the observation procedures themselves. Indeed, one may ask whether the entire phenomenon of direct instruction was an artifact of observation, an attempt by the families to behave as "good mothers" for the benefit of the middle-class researchers. Graves and Glick (1978) reported striking differences in the way that six middle-class mothers interacted with their two-year-olds when they were aware of being observed and when they were unaware. The study differed from the present study in that each mother-child pair was observed for a total of thirty minutes in a laboratory setting, and no mention was m a d e of attempts to establish rapport prior to the data collection. Most relevant to the present study was the finding that the n u m b e r of naming games increased dramatically from a total of nine in the unobserved condition to twenty in the observed condition. (This particular analysis was based on only two of the motherchild pairs.) The authors drew attention to the implications of their findings for comparative research: It may be that the direction of change in maternal behavior is related to the values a particular social class places on various child-rearing practices. The conception of the normative "ideal mother" role may, in fact, be quite different for members of different social classes. Perhaps lower-class mothers may not alter their behaviors—or at least not as radically, or perhaps in a different direction from white, middle-class mothers—when confronted with an "authority figure" in experimental and other situations, (p. 46) With respect to the idea of the "ideal mother," we know that the mothers in the present study believed in the importance of teaching children. Perhaps, in a special effort to be "good teachers" before the camera, they engaged in more naming sequences than usual. If so, they were altering their behavior in the same direction as the middle-class mothers, not in a different direction as Graves and Glick suggested. My impression is that this did happen to some degree in the first sample. The highest frequency of instructional interactions occurred in the first sample for Amy and Beth. Six of

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Direct Instruction 131 Beth s twenty interactions in this sample fell into the category of "grammar, pronunciation, and intonation," an unusually high frequency for this category for any of the children. This, I think, reflected Nora's attempt to encourage Beth to speak explicitly for my sake. In the remaining seven samples only three interactions of this sort occurred. Even if the incidence of direct instruction increased in my presence, it was clear that direct instruction was not a novel behavior confined to the taping sessions—just as naming games were not restricted only to the observation condition in the study by Graves and Glick. Direct instruction was part of the mothers' expressed ideology about childrearing. When asked directly whether they gave instruction only when I was present, the families said "no." Amy's Uncle Bruce said that various members of his family, including himself, frequently named and rhymed with Amy. He added, "How would she know to do them on tape, if she didn't do them other times?" Even speakers as young as five years old acted as teachers in relation to younger children. Pretend play with dolls was occasionally structured around this theme—by mothers interacting with their daughters and by the children alone. The children owned books. In interviews Liz gave detailed descriptions of how she read to Wendy and how Wendy "read" to herself. In the later tapes Wendy brought the books to me and asked me to read with her. There was evidence that the form of the interactions changed developmentally and that the children did, in fact, learn from them. It is doubtful that they would have learned the function of What-questions had they participated in naming sequences only during a one-hour session every three weeks. All these are indications that direct instruction was not simply an artifact of observation but a part of everyday life in South Baltimore.

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5

Combining Words to Express Meanings The preceding chapter examined a special type of recurring interaction. In this chapter the utterance itself becomes the unit of study. Specifically, I was interested in the kinds of meanings that Amy, Wendy, and Beth expressed in their early word combinations. Before going any further I want to clarify how I use the term "meaning" here. I do not refer to the meaning of individual words but rather to the ideas or relationships that are expressed by combining words. Imagine, for example, that a child picks up her stuffed cat and says, "my cat." By combining "my" and "cat" she conveys that the cat belongs to her. That is, she expresses a relationship of Possession. On another occasion she touches her shoe and says, "my shoe," and then touches her mother's shoe and says, "mommy shoe." Here, too, the child forms two-word combinations that express the relationship of Possession. There are a variety of other relationships that the child might express. Consider, for example, the utterance "that a cat," said as she notices a cat outside. By combining "that" and "a" and "cat," the child names the cat, points it out. She expresses the notion of Nomination (Brown 1973) or Existence (Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975). Or, to take still another example, by combining "mommy" and "dance" to form "mommy dance," the child expresses an Action relationship. In all these cases the child expresses meanings by combining words. These meanings have been called semantic/syntactic relations by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and compositional meanings by Brown (1973). I use these terms synonymously throughout. In contrast to the issue of direct instruction, the issue of compositional meanings did not originate with the families. I did not specifically solicit the mothers' views on combining words, and there was little incidental evidence that this was a compelling issue to them. Only Nora wondered aloud (to me) about how children put words together in their minds to express meanings. However, in the formal study of language acquisition, combining words to express meanings has emerged as one of the ma-

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jor tasks of early language development. In recent years it has been the object of in-depth descriptive studies among middle-class American children (Bloom, Hood, and Lightbown 1974; Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975) and French-speaking Canadian children (Lightbown 1977). In addition, relevant data are available on children who were learning a variety of other languages, including Swedish, Finnish, Mexican Spanish, and Samoan (Brown 1973). The evidence from these sources consistently indicates that the meanings expressed in children's early word combinations can be accounted for by a small set of categories. The present study provided an opportunity to expand the data base, to test these categories against evidence from a group of children who had not been studied before. Or, to put it another way, I wanted to know how Amy, Wendy, and Beth would compare with other groups of children from a variety of sociocultural backgrounds. Would they encode the same semantic/syntactic relations in their early sentences, and, if so, how would these relations develop over time? As described in Chapter 2, this analysis involved a replication of studies by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977). I followed their procedures as closely as possible and, except for a few minor revisions, adopted their categories of semantic/syntactic relations. This chapter is organized to facilitate comparisons with these earlier studies. It is important to point out that Amy, Wendy and Beth, like Lightbown s subjects, had MLU s of at least 1.5, whereas Blooms subjects had much lower MLUs in the earliest samples. The samples with comparable MLU s from Bloom et al. are Eric IV, V; Gia III, IV, V; Kathryn II, III; and Peter VI, VII. These are the samples that are compared to the results of the present study. Presented in Table 14 are the absolute and proportional frequencies of relational types in each of the twenty categories of semantic/syntactic relations. That is, the figures displayed here tell us how many and what proportion of the children's expressed relations fell into the Existence category, the Action category, and so on.1 In the majority of categories the number of relations tended to increase across time for all of the children. 'The analysis in this chapter is based on utterance types, not tokens. That is, a given utterance is counted only once, regardless of how many times the child repeats it in a given sample. For example, the utterance "my soda" added only one relational type to the category of Possession, even though the child might have said "my soda" five times in a particular sample.

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Table 14. Absolute and Proportional Frequencies of Different Semantic/Syntactic Relations Amy Category

/

II

III

V

IV

VI

VII

VIII

Existence Negation Recurrence Action Locative Action Residual Action Locative State State Notice Intention Possession Attribution Major categories combined Minor categories Wh-Question Place Vocative Performative Stereotype Rhyme/Routine Other Equivocal/Undetermined Number relations in sample

6 (.11) 5 (.09) O(-) 16 (.30) 8 (.15) O(-) 1 (.02) 1 (.02) 2 (.04) 2 (.04) 3 (.06) 1 (-02)

6 (.05) 16 (.13) 16 (.07) 18 (.07) 28 (.08) 12 (.18) 12 (.10) 5 (.04) 3 (.03) 5 (.04) 5 (.08) 8 (.03) 9 (.04) 12 (.03) 3 (.01) 2 (.03) 8 (.03) O ( - ) 1 (.01) o 1 (-01) 12 (.18) 20 (.17) 28 (.25) 13 (.10) 45 (.19) 44 (.17) 68 (.19) 5 (.04) 7 (.06) 22 (.17) 14 (.06) 8 (.03) 24 (.07) 3 (.05) 1 (.00) 0 (-) 0 (-) 0 (-) 1 (.01) 0 ( - ) 0 (-) 5 (.04) 3 (.05) 12 (.10) 1 (.00) 11 (.03) 3 (.01) 9 (.07) 3 (.03) 6 (.05) 9 (.03) 3 (.05) 9 (.04) 10 (.04) 3 (.02) 6 (.05) 9 (.08) 15 (.12) 18 (.08) 23 (.09) 26 (.07) 4 (.06) 5 (.04) 3 (.01) 2 (.03) 8 (.03) 1 (.01) 1 (-01) 6 (.03) 8 (.07) 5 (.08) 6 (.05) 6 (.05) 17 (.07) 37 (.15) 62 (.17) 5 (.04) 3 (.03) 7 (.03) 12 (.05) 23 (.06) 5 (.04) O(-)

45 (.83)

51 (.78)

O(-) 3 (.06) O(-) 0(-) 1 (.02) 1 (-02) 1 (.02) 3 (.06)

O(-) 2 (.03) O(-) 0 (-) 2 (.03) 7 (.11) 1 (-02) 2 (.03)

54

65

78 (.67) 3 2 2 0 5 13 3 10

(.03) (.02) (.02) (-) (.04) (.11) (.03) (.09)

116

79 (.70)

96 (.75) 151 (.63) 170 (.67) 270 (.75) 8 (-) 4 (.03) (.03) 19 7 (.02) 9 (.02) (.06) 10 (.01) 7 (.07) 25

1 (.01) 2 (.02) 9 (.08) 4 (.04) 3 (.03) 8 (.07) O(-) 7 (.06)

0 4 4 3 3 8 1 9

113

128

(.03) 7 (.03) 10 (.03) 4 (.01) 5 (.02) (.02) (.08) 30 (.12) 30 (.08) 6 (.02) 2 (.01) (.03) (.04) 16 (.06) 13 (.04) 3 (.01) 6 (.02) (.04) 1 (.00) 12 (.03) (.03) (.10) 17 (.07) 13 (.04)

240

254

361

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Note: In each column, the first number is N; the second (in parentheses) is the proportional frequency. See Appendix E for definitions and examples of the categories.

Combi

Major categories

s' 3' ^

s*

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Table 14 continued Category

Wendy /

II

IV

III

V

VI

VII

VIII

Major categories Existence Negation Recurrence Action Locative Action Residual Action Locative State State Notice Intention Possession Attribution Major categories combined Minor categories

9 (.05) 10 (.06) O(-) 37 (.22) 26 (.15) 0 (-) 2 (.01) 9 (.05) 3 (.02) 13 (.08) 10 (.06) 2 (.01)

4 25 6 52 41 15 7 23 13 30 42 12

(.01) (.07) (.02) (.14) (.11) (.04) (.02) (.06) (.03) (.08) (.11) (.03)

87 (.77)

95 (.77) 102 (.80) 147 (.68) 132 (.76) 107 (.79) 121 (.71) 270 (.71)

3 (.03) 3 (.03) 3 (.03) 2 (.02) 3 (.03) O(-) 1 (.01) 11 (.10)

2 (.02) 2 (.02) 1 (-01) 2 (.02) 9 (.07) O(-) 2 (.02) 11 (.09)

113

124

3 2 4 1 3 1 4 7

(.02) 4 6 (.02) 6 (.03) (.01) 2 4 (.02) (.01) 4 (.03) 17 (.06) 26

127

(.02) (.03) (.03) (.01) (.02) (.02) (.08) (.12)

216

3 7 2 0 7 1 4 17

(.02) (.04) (.01) (-) (.04) (.01) (.02) (.10)

173

0 2 6 1 2 8 3 7

3 (.02) 2 (.01) (-) (.02) 2 (.01) 9 (.02) (.04) 1 (.01) 19 (.05) (.01) 1 (-01) 9 (.02) (.02) 6 (.04) 11 (.03) (.06) 4 (.02) 11 (.03) (.02) 12 (.07) 28 (.07) (.05) 21 (.12) 20 (.05)

136

171

379

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Note: In each column, the first number is N; the second (in parentheses) is the proportional frequency. See Appendix E for definitions and examples of the categories.

p»

'omb*

Wh-Question Place Vocative Performative Stereotype Rhyme/Routine Other Equivocal/Undetermined Number relations in sample

6 (.04) 17 (.15) 14 (.11) 26 (.20) 15 (.07) 17 (.10) 6 (.05) 9 (.07) 12 (.05) 17 (.10) 2 (.02) 2 (.02) 2 (.02) 2 (.01) O(-) O(-) 1 (-01) O(-) 14 (.12) 33 (.27) 29 (.23) 46 (.21) 24 (.14) 32 (.24) 6 (.05) 9 (.07) 8 (.04) 19 (.11) 22 (.16) 16 (.14) 5 (.03) O ( - ) O(-) O(-) 1 (-01) 0 ( - ) 5 (.03) 5 (.04) 2 (.01) O(-) 1 (.01) 2 (.02) 4 (.03) 8 (.06) 13 (.06) 12 (.07) 14 (.10) 13 (.12) 9 (.07) 6 (.05) 14 (.06) 3 (.03) 6 (.03) 3 (.02) 6 (.05) 4 (.03) 2 (.02) 8 (.04) 9 (.05) 11 (.08) 8 (.06) 3 (.02) 16 (.07) 14 (.08) 16 (.14) 8 (.06) 6 (.05) 6 (.05) 11 (.05) 3 (.03) 4 (.02) 3 (.02)

s"

S'

^ ^ ^8* £ ^

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Table 14 continued

Beth /

Category

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Wh-Question Place Vocative Performative Stereotype Rhyme/Routine Other Equivocal/Undetermined Number relations in sample

ON

9

Major categories Existence Negation Recurrence Action Locative Action Residual Action Locative State State Notice Intention Possession Attribution Major categories combined Minor categories

u»

28 8 15 50 22 38 17 6 8 12 12 16

(.10) 17 (.08) 10 (.05) 27 (.12) 11 (.08) 27 (.09) 17 (.07) 19 (.05) 7 (.03) 14 (.04) 7 (.03) 7 (.04) 9 (.04) (.03) 1 (.01) 5 (.02) 4 (.01) 6 (.02) 1 (.00) 3 (.02) 3 (.01) (.05) 1 (.01) 2 (.01) (.18) 38 (.19) 39 (.21) 35 (.16) 24 (.18) 79 (.27) 53 (.21) 83 (.23) 8 (.06) 6 (.02) 21 (.08) 27 (.07) 9 (.05) 19 (.09) (.08) 12 (.06) 1 (.00) 2 (.01) (.14) 11 (.05) 10 (.05) 0(-) 0(-) O(-) 6 (.02) 4 (.02) 9 (.04) 5 (.02) 7 (.04) (.06) 1 (-01) 17 (.06) 9 (.03) 13 (.05) 20 (.06) 2 (.01) 9 (.07) 6 (.03) 6 (.03) (.02) 3 (.01) 12 (.03) 5 (.03) 29 (.13) 11 (.08) 11 (.04) (.03) 15 (.07) 3 (.01) 7 (.05) 11 (.04) 15 (.06) 18 (.05) 3 (.01) 11 (.06) (.04) (.04) 20 (.10) 24 (.13) 35 (.16) 30 (.22) 46 (.16) 50 (.20) 64 (.18) 9 (.04) 6 (.04) 13 (.05) 12 (.05) 18 (.05) 9 (.05) (.06) 10 (.05)

232 (.83) 149 (.74) 140 (.77) 176 (.80) 109 (.80) 226 (.78) 203 (.79) 286 (.79) 7 (.03) 6 (.02) 3 (.01) 3 (.01) 7 (.03) O(-) 6 (.02) 14 (.05) 278

15 (.07) 1 (.01) 1 (.01) 3 (.01) 6 (.03) O(-) 4 (.02) 23 (.11) 202

5 4 2 1 6 1 6 18

(.03) (.02) (.01) (-01) (.03) (.01) (.03) (.10)

183

3 5 2 5 5 3 2 19

(.01) (.02) (.01) (.02) (.02) (.01) (.01) (.09)

220

4 (.03) 12 (.04) 2 (.01) 0 (-) 4 (.01) 0 (-) 7 (.02) 2 (.01) 5 (.02) 5 (.04) 0(-) O(-) 1 (-01) 7 (.02) 15 (.11) 25 (.09) 136

288

15 (.06) 3 (.01) 2 (.01) 2 (.01) 5 (.02) O(-) 9 (.04) 17 (.07)

12 (.03) 4 (.01) 9 (.02) 7 (.02) 5 (.01) 0(-) 6 (.02) 34 (.09)

256

363

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Note: In each column, the first number is N; the second (in parentheses) is the proportional frequency. See Appendix E for definitions and examples of the categories.

Combining Words

137

Also presented is the total number of relations found in each sample. For example, if a child produced 3 relations in each of the 20 categories, her total number of relations for that sample would be 60. With the exception of the first two samples for Amy, the total number of relations per sample exceeded 100. Only Amy showed a consistent increase across the eight samples in the total number of relations expressed. But each of the children produced more than 350 different relations in the final sample, a number far exceeding the totals for the earlier samples. Adequacy of the Categories Since the categories were derived originally from other studies involving different populations of children, one needs to ask first whether the categories are adequate to describe this new set of data. I expected that the categories which accounted for the majority of children's multi-word utterances in Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) would also describe the multiword utterances produced by Amy, Wendy, and Beth. This hypothesis was confirmed. Displayed in Table 14 are the proportional frequencies for the following categories combined: Existence, Negation, Recurrence, Action, Locative Action, Residual Action, Locative State, State, Notice, Intention, Possession, and Attribution. In each sample these combined categories accounted for at least .63 of the multi-word relations. Over all subjects and all samples an average of .75 of the relations fell into this subset of categories. Comparable average figures from the previous studies are strikingly similar: .77 for the middle-class American children in Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and .80 for the French-speaking Canadian children in Lightbown (1977). Brown (1973) reviewed relatively complete data from children who were learning American English, Finnish, Samoan, Swedish, and Mexican Spanish 2 and fragmentary data on French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Luo, and Russian. He concluded that children's early word combinations could be accounted for by a small set of operations and relations: Nomination, Nonexistence, Recurrence, Agent and Action, Action and Object, Agent and Object, Action and Locative, Entity and Locative, Possessor and Pos2

The data on Mexican Spanish came from Tolberts (1971) unpublished study of a lower-class child from Mexico.

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138

Combining Words

session, Entity and Attributive, and Demonstrative and Entity. The definitions of these categories are quite compatible with those of the present study. It appears, then, that Amy, Wendy, and Beth, like children from a variety of other language communities, formed two- and three-word sentences whose meanings could be accounted for by a limited set of categories. Sequence of Development of Semantic/Syntactic Relations A second hypothesis concerned the sequence of development of the categories of semantic/syntactic relations. I expected that the order of emergence documented by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) would also apply to Amy, Wendy, and Beth. In this section, I consider, in turn, groups of related categories (functional relations and verb relations); each of the major categories individually (Existence, Negation, Recurrence, Action, Locative Action, Residual Action, Locative State, State, Notice, Intention, Possession, Attribution); and, finally, the minor categories (Wh-Question, Place, Vocative, Performative, Stereotype, Rhyme/Routine, Other, Equivocal/Undetermined). This section concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the obtained sequence of development compares with the results of previous studies. FUNCTIONAL RELATIONS AND VERB RELATIONS

The functional relations include the categories of Existence, Negation, and Recurrence. These are called functional because utterances in these categories include function words which retain the same compositional meaning regardless of the words with which they are combined. For example, more signals recurrence whether it is paired with doll, as in "more doll" or with chocolate, as in "more chocolate." The verb relations include the categories of Action, Locative Action, Residual Action,3 Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention. Charted in Figure 2 are the proportional frequencies of the combined functional relations and the combined verb relations for each child separately. There are several findings of interest. First, for all three children the proportional frequencies of functional relations decreased over time. In the first sample this group 3

As described in Chapter 2, utterances in the Residual Action category included the verb ride and clearly referred to an action. However, these utterances could not be unequivocally assigned to the Action category rather than the Locative Action category.

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Combining Words 139 Figure 2. Proportion of Multi-Word Relations Accounted For by Functional Relations and Verb Relations • Verb relations (Action, Locative Action, Residual Action, Locative State, State, Notice, Intention)

1.00

• Functional relations (Existence, Negation, Recurrence)

.80

.60

.40

.20

I 1.5

MLU

II 1.5

III 1.6

IV 1.5

V 1.5

VI 2.2

VII 1.6

VIII 2.4

II 1.6

III 1.6

IV 2.1

V 1.5

VI 2.0

VII 2.0

VIII 2.1

II 1.9

III 1.8

IV 2.2

V 2.0

VI 2.1

VII 2.4

VIII 2.5

Amy

1.00

.80

.60

.40

.20

I MLU 1.6

Wendy

1.00

.80

.60

.40

.20

MLU

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I 2.2

Beth

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140 Combining Words of relations accounted for at least .17 of the multi-word relations for each child. By the final sample the proportions declined to about .10 for each of the children. These relations did not disappear, however. In fact, the absolute frequency of functional relations increased for Amy and Wendy. These findings are consistent with corresponding findings by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) and seem to indicate that functional relations represent an early development and decline proportionately as the children add other relations to their repertoires. Also in agreement with these earlier studies is the finding that verb relations exceeded functional relations in every sample. Generally, the verb relations hovered between .40 and .55 for all of the children. The proportions of verb relations increased over time for Wendy. This too is consistent with the earlier studies. However, Amy and Beth showed a decrease in verb relations. Examination of the proportional frequencies of the other categories indicated that Possession increased dramatically for Amy and Beth, thereby depressing the proportions of all relations accounted for by the verb categories. THE MAJOR CATEGORIES

Examined here are developmental trends in the absolute and proportional frequencies of each of the major categories. (See Table 14.) Another way in which past researchers have traced the development of these categories is by means of a productivity criterion. This refers to the minimal amount of evidence required in order to attribute to a child productive (or creative) knowledge of a linguistic construction. By use of a productivity criterion, one attempts to rule out the possibility that the child has simply memorized an utterance as an unanalyzed unit—rather than learning a rule for combining words. Following the example of Lightbown (1977), I established a criterion of three relational types per sample. That is, a child was credited with productive knowledge of a given category, say Intention, when, in a single sample, she produced at least three different utterances from that category. Results. Of the functional relations, Existence was the most frequent category, although it never accounted for more than .20 of the multi-word relations in any sample. This category was productive in the earliest sample for each child. Only for Amy was there a clearly discernible increase across time with respect to absolute frequencies. The proportional frequency of Existence relations decreased for all three children, accounting for no more than .08 of all relations in the final sample.

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Combining Words 141 The Negation category was used productively in the first or second sample for each of the children and never accounted for more than .10 of the multi-word relations in any sample. Although the absolute frequency of utterance types increased across the samples for all three children, developmental trends in proportional frequencies were less clear: a slight decrease for Amy a slight increase for Wendy no discernible trend for Beth. Amy, Wendy, and Beth produced very few relations from the Recurrence category. This was the least frequent of the major categories, accounting for an average of .01 of the relations for Amy, .01 for Wendy, and .02 for Beth. This category was productive in the earliest sample for Beth and declined absolutely and proportionately thereafter. Productivity was not achieved until the sixth sample for Amy and the eighth sample for Wendy. Within the group of verb relations the Action and Locative Action categories were productive for all three children from the very beginning. The remaining verb categories—Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention—were used productively by Beth in the first sample. Wendy used State and Notice productively in the first sample, Intention in the second, Locative State in the fifth. Amy demonstrated productive use of Locative State, State, and Notice in the second sample, Intention in the third. The Action category was the most frequent single category in 19 of the 24 samples. Action relations accounted for an average of .18 of all relations for Amy, .19 for Wendy, and .21 for Beth. Action relations tended to decrease proportionately for Amy, assumed no apparent pattern for Wendy, and increased slightly for Beth. However, charting Beth s development was problematical owing to the fact that in the first three samples she produced utterances that included the verb ride and could not be unequivocally committed to the Action category rather than the Locative Action category. These ambiguous utterances were placed in a Residual Action category. If these utterances are counted as Action relations, the trend is toward a developmental decline in Action relations for Beth, as for Amy. The average proportional frequencies of Locative Action relations were .07 for Amy, .10 for Wendy, and .06 for Beth. In general, absolute frequencies increased over time, but trends in proportional frequencies were not discernible. Adding the Residual Action category to the Locative Action category, one finds a definite decrease over time for Beth. The categories of Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention were infrequent for all three children. In general, each of these cat-

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142 Combining Words egories accounted for no more than .08 of the semantic/syntactic relations in each sample. Generally, there was an increase across time in the absolute frequency of each of these categories, but there were no clear developmental trends in proportional frequencies except for a slight increase in the Intention category for Wendy. The category of Possession was productive for all three children from the beginning. The average proportions of Possession relations were .11 for Amy, .08 for Wendy, and .15 for Beth. Amy and Beth showed a dramatic increase in the absolute and proportional frequency of Possession relations: Amy went from .06 in the first sample to .17 in the final sample; Beth, from .04 to .18. The data from Wendy differed in that proportional frequencies fluctuated, revealing no clear trend across time. Absolute frequencies tended to increase for Wendy, but with less consistency than for the other two children. Wendy and Beth used the Attribution category productively in the first sample, Amy in the third. This was an infrequent category for all three children, accounting for a m a x i m u m of .06 of the relations in any given sample. The highest absolute frequency occurred in the final sample for all three children. But only Amy showed a steady rise across time in both absolute and proportional frequencies. Comparison with Previous Studies. The following is a list of the major similarities between these results and the results of Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) at comparable MLU levels: (1) The category of Existence tended to decline proportionately. In the final sample (MLU— 2.5), Existence accounted for no more than .08 of the semantic/syntactic relations. (2) Negation tended to be a relatively infrequent category ( < .10) for all the children except Lightbown s Nathalie. There were no apparent developmental trends in proportional frequencies. (3) Action relations (Action, Locative Action, Residual Action) tended to become productive earlier than state relations (Locative State, State, Notice). (Beth provided no evidence relevant to this sequence, as she used all of these categories productively in the first sample.) (4) Action was the most frequent single category in almost every sample. (5) The categories of Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention were infrequent and generally accounted for no more than .08 of the multi-word relations in each sample.

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Combining Words 143 (6) Intention tended to be a later development than the other verb categories. (7) There was individual variation in the development of Possession. This category became productive when MLU was as low as 1.3 (Kathryn) and 1.5 (Amy) or as high as 2.6 (Eric). In all of the studies the proportional frequency of possessive relations increased developmentally for some children (Amy Beth, Gia, Kathryn, Nathalie) but not for others (Wendy, Eric, Peter, Daniel). There were also several differences between the present study and the earlier studies: (1) Recurrence tended to be less frequent for Amy, Wendy, and Beth than for children from the other studies. Amy and Wendy did not use this category productively until the later samples. This contrasts with children from the other studies for whom Recurrence was productive when MLU was 1.5 or less. (Beth used Recurrence productively in the earliest samples when her MLU was already about 2.0.) (2) Possession was used more frequently by Amy and Beth than by children from the other studies, who were more similar to Wendy. Also, Amy and Beth showed a more striking rise across samples in the proportion of possessive relations. (3) The category of Attribution tended to be used less frequently by Amy, Wendy, and Beth than by children from the other studies. THE MINOR CATEGORIES

The remaining categories—Wh-Question, Place, Vocative, Performative, Stereotype, Rhyme/Routine, Other, Equivocal/Undetermined—occurred infrequently. Each category generally accounted for no more than .07 of the multi-word relations in each sample, and in the vast majority of samples the proportions were much lower. There were two exceptions to this general picture, both involving Amy. Vocatives became productive for Amy in the fourth sample and accounted for an average of .08 of her relations in the fourth through eighth samples. Also, the category of Rhyme/Routine accounted for .11 of Amy s multi-word relations in two samples and an average of .05 across all samples. The group of categories called "Other" included categories which appeared sporadically and with very low frequencies. These included Greeting, Affirmation, Time, Manner, Dative, Instrument, Conjunction, Causality, and Identity. In the majority of samples this group of categories accounted for no more than .03 of all relations. Some of the categories, such as Dative, Time, Instrument,

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144 Combining Words and Causality, appeared only in the final samples, if at all. Over all samples for all children, .08 of the relations fell into the Equivocal/Undetermined category. On the average, .06 of Amy's relations could not be classified, .08 of Wendy's, and .09 of Beth's. The proportional frequency of Equivocal/Undetermined relations never exceeded .12 in any sample. These findings are consistent with the results of Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977). They too found that the minor categories tended to occur very infrequently when MLU was under 3.0 and that some, such as Dative and Instrument, were late developments. DISCUSSION OF SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN THE SEQUENCE OF DEVELOPMENT

In general, the findings presented above support the hypothesis that Amy, Wendy, and Beth followed the same sequence of semantic/syntactic development that Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) h a d identified for other groups of children. The functional relations were less frequent than the verb relations in every sample and declined proportionately as the children added other relations to their repertoires. The action relations (Action, Locative Action, Residual Action) tended to become productive earlier than the state relations (Locative State, State, Notice). Also consistent with the earlier studies were developments in several of the individual categories. The category of Existence tended to decrease proportionately, whereas Negation showed no apparent developmental trends. In almost all samples Action was the most frequent single category. The categories of Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention were generally infrequent, and Intention tended to emerge later than other verb categories. Individual variation characterized the development of Possession: this category emerged earlier for some children than for others, and there was an increase in proportional frequencies for some children but not for others. The minor categories occurred very infrequently, and some—Dative, Time, Instrument, Causality—appeared only in the later samples, if at all. These developments are also highly consistent with those reported by Leonard (1976) using a somewhat different set of categories. In a review of previous literature and in his own longitudinal study of eight middle-class children, he found that operations of reference (similar to functional relations) emerged earliest. These were followed by various relations that, in the present study, are called verb relations. Leonard s categories of Experience and Expe-

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Combining Words 145 riencer (which apparently overlap with Intention and Notice as defined here) were relatively late developments. Appearing still later were utterances that expressed the notion of Instrument. Despite these similarities with earlier studies, the present investigation also revealed that Amy, Wendy, and Beth differed in some ways from the children in Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977). The proportional frequencies of verb relations tended to decrease for Amy and Beth, whereas Wendy and children from the other studies showed an increase. The main reason for this difference is that proportional frequencies in the category of Possession increased sharply for Amy and Beth but not for the other children. Amy and Beth seemed increasingly interested in figuring out what belongs to whom and in asserting their claims of ownership. Beth's frequent use of possessive constructions was especially noticeable as they often occurred in the context of teasing routines. In the early samples Nora initiated these interactions by issuing a mock challenge to Beth s claim to an object. For example, in the first sample Nora picked up Beth s doll and said provocatively, "Aw, I got me a beautiful one." Beth countered with "my baby," and there followed a series of assertions and counterassertions. Generally, Amy did not engage in teasing routines of this sort, but she received direct instruction in asserting her claims to objects. Also, she frequently showed her possessions to others. Obviously, what is needed is a systematic analysis of the interactions in which possessive constructions are used—not only by Amy and Beth but by Wendy a n d children from other backgrounds. A second difference concerns the category of Recurrence. Children from Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) tended to use this category more frequently and achieved productivity earlier than Amy and Wendy. (Beth used this category productively in the first samples, when MLU already approximated 2.0.) However, by the final sample Amy, Wendy, and Beth embedded all of their Recurrence relations into other kinds of relations. They produced such sentences as "I want more chocolate," "Mommy, I w a n t more meat," "Take more juice, Marlene," and "Where other sock?" This shows that the children not only had mastered Recurrence relations but could incorporate them into complex constructions. Leonard s (1976) findings with respect to Recurrence are relevant here. Two of his subjects did not express Recurrence in any of the samples (covering an MLU period from 1.0 to 2.5). The other six subjects expressed Recurrence, but it appeared in the early sam-

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146 Combining Words pies for some children and much later for others. Regardless of when Recurrence emerged, it occurred infrequently for all six children. Leonard concluded that the variability in the time of emergence could be attributed in large part to the low frequency of occurrence of Recurrence relations. This explanation is compatible with the findings for Amy, Wendy, and Beth. Recurrence occurred infrequently and, therefore, had fewer chances of being observed in a given sample. Finally, although Amy, Wendy, and Beth used Attribution productively in the early samples, this category tended to occur less frequently for them than for children from the other studies. It appears that there may be a trade-off between Attribution and Possession for some children. For example, Bloom's Eric and Lightbown s Daniel tended to use Attribution more frequently than Possession, whereas Amy, Beth, and Lightbown's Nathalie tended to use Possession more frequently than Attribution. In sum, these differences in the development of compositional meanings represent minor variations on a theme of similarity. Amy, Wendy, and Beth progressed through a developmental sequence that closely resembled the sequence previously identified for other groups of children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. The consistency across studies is even more impressive when one considers that type of population was not the only factor that differentiated the studies. For example, the present study, unlike the studies by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977), involved video-recording methods. And, in contrast to Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood, it involved (1) primarily mother-child interaction rather than investigator-child interaction; and (2) one-hour samples compared with samples as long as eight hours. EXPLANATIONS FOR DEVELOPMENTS IN COMPOSITIONAL MEANINGS

It is important to ask first whether the sequence of development of compositional meanings is simply a methodological artifact. Leonard (1976) considered the possibility, raised earlier by Bowerm a n (1975), that the sequence may be related to the respective frequencies of the various compositional meanings in the children's speech. That is, the order in which meanings emerge might reflect an artifact of sampling. Perhaps, for example, the children could express the meaning of Intention from the very beginning, b u t when relatively few multi-word utterances were produced (as tends to be the case in the early samples), there was less chance of recording

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Combining Words 147 instances of Intention. However, the finding of strikingly consistent developmental changes in the proportions of the various compositional meanings argues against this possibility. (See Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975 and Lightbown 1977 for detailed discussions of this point.) Equally important is Leonard s point that even when sample sizes vary enormously across children, the same basic sequence prevails. In the present study, for example, the total n u m b e r of relational types in the final one-hour sample was roughly 360 for each of the children. At comparable MLU levels we find 1,110 relational types for Bloom s Eric (over a period of eight hours) and 1,642 for Kathryn (over a period of about seven hours). Yet Dative and Instrument accounted for few if any of the relational types for Eric and Kathryn, just as they accounted for few if any of the relational types for Amy, Wendy, and Beth, whose samples were much smaller. It appears, then, that the sequence of development of compositional meanings is not simply a methodological artifact. A n u m b e r of researchers have proposed that developments in early compositional meanings are related to the child's cognitive development. Brown (1973), for example, concluded that children from various cultures express the same kinds of compositional meanings because children everywhere develop according to the same cognitive plan. He focused specifically on Piagets account of sensori-motor development: "I think that the first sentences express the construction of reality which is the terminal achievement of sensori-motor intelligence. . . . Representation starts with just those meanings that are most available to it, propositions about action schemes involving agents and objects, assertions of nonexistence, recurrence, location, and so on" (p. 200). Leonard (1976) offered a concurring opinion, suggesting that the sequence of development reflects, and perhaps is determined by, the child s cognitive development. Bloom (1973) and Brown (1973) attempted to explain why the functional relations of Existence, Negation, and Recurrence are the first to be encoded in multi-word utterances. These notions are already cognitively available to the young child and can be expressed with a small n u m b e r of words, such as this (Existence), no (Negation), and more (Recurrence). In addition, these notions are widely applicable, as many kinds of things can exist, disappear, or recur. In light of their cognitive accessibility, linguistic accessibility, and utility, it is not surprising that the functional relations are early developments. Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) explained the progression

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148 Combining Words from functional relations to action relations to state relations as resulting "from the primacy of actions over states in the interaction between cognitive and linguistic development" (p. 31). During the single-word period, expressions of functional notions are tied to actual movements. The child names an object, "shoe," while picking it u p or putting it on. But by the time the children are able to combine words, their utterances are no longer dependent on action and can occur in reference to states of existence, nonexistence, and recurrence. The child says "that shoe" in reference to the shoe that m o m m y is wearing. From functional relations, which refer to events involving single objects, children progress to linguistic representations of relations between objects, or between persons and objects, or between objects and locations. Here again actions precede states: children first encode relations that are accompanied by actions (the action of catching a ball, the locative action of putting the doll into the truck) before encoding relations that do not involve movements (the locative state of flowers on the coffee table, the state of being tired, the noticing of a friend on the street). Another factor which may be involved in the order of acquisition of compositional meanings is the relative frequency of these relations in speech to young children. Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) analyzed investigators' speech to children and found that the relative frequencies of certain relations (Action, Locative Action, Locative State, and Notice) paralleled the relative frequencies of these same relations in the children's speech. However, other relations were very frequent in adult speech (Attribution, Wh-Question) b u t not in the children's speech. The authors suggested that the order of acquisition may be determined not so much by frequency of exposure as by children's active search for ways of expressing what they know. Snow (1977a, 19776) analyzed thirteen samples of mothers' speech to young children and found that Brown's prevalent semantic relations (Agent and Action, Action and Object, Agent and Object, Action and Locative, Entity and Locative, Possessor and Possession, Entity and Attributive, Demonstrative and Entity) accounted for .66 of the propositional meanings contained in the mothers' sentences. She interpreted this in terms of the conversational context of early language development. In attempting to communicate reciprocally with their children, mothers may limit their meanings to those that are comprehensible to the child. Snow also suggested that the frequency of a specific structure in speech to children may have an important effect on language learning, but only after the child has already developed the cognitive basis for understanding that structure.

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Combining Words 149

In sum, the results of the present study contribute to the growing consensus that young children everywhere construct sentences that can be accounted for by a small set of compositional meanings. The underlying causes of this apparent universal of child language are still not understood. It appears that early developments in compositional meanings reflect a complex interplay of factors, including cognitive accessibility, linguistic complexity, communicative usefulness, and frequency of exposure.

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6 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions The Children and Their Families Amy, Wendy, and Beth, being two years old (and living in South Baltimore), had a variety of cognitive, linguistic, and expressive abilities. They pretended to cook a chicken, smoke a cigarette, read a book. They took care of "babies." While Amy toilet trained hers in a living room on Light Street, Beth took Louise to the A&P for ice cream, and Wendy, singing, settled a difficult baby into the stroller, threw her to the floor, picked her up, and hugged her. The children imitated the behaviors of their five-year-old playmates, writing, rhyming, doing jumping jacks and forward rolls. They concentrated and inspected; listened ardently to stories; made study after study of pouring, building, giving and receiving. They grimaced, pointed, shrugged their shoulders, grinned, and struck a fighters pose. They danced. They hugged and swatted. They combined words to express meanings; entered, maintained, and withdrew from conversation. They marked exchanges ("Here mommy. Here Peggy. Here Terry."); hollered and romped; called ("Tom-my," "Lor-i"); named; issued demands ("Want ninny!"); disputed and provoked ("Shut up, punk"); announced their intentions ("That goes there"); asserted claims of ownership ("My coat"); expressed concern ("Allright, don't fall down, OK?"); sang "Happy Birthday"; and invented playful routines. Marlene, Liz, and Nora offered detailed observations about their children, pointed out developmental trends, expressed strongly held beliefs about childrearing. Marlene fostered independence, appreciated Amy's athletic ability and her growing verbal assertiveness. She placed a high value on sharing. Liz valued friendliness, happiness, and politeness in a child. She tried to cope with the battles of will to which she and Wendy were susceptible. She encouraged Wendy's musical inclinations, hoped that she would finish high school and, perhaps, go on to college. Nora communicated more than anything her pleasure in Beth. She had a gift for fantasy. She believed that children learn by doing and went to some inconvenience to allow Beth to "help" with adult tasks. All of the mothers

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Summaries, Conclusions, Questions

151

said that they taught their daughters to defend themselves when necessary. Nora tied this idea to the prohibition against being a sissy, offering a theory of mental health that emphasized strength, pride, and self-control. Pampering, spoiling are bad for children, who need to learn quickly not to give in to sorrow, pain, or fear. Nora also approved of her daughter s anger and transmitted to Beth her own complicated feelings of jealousy. All of these feelings—sorrow, pain, fear, anger, jealousy—are feelings that her daughter needs to learn to cope with early in life. In short, the portraits show that Amy, Wendy, and Beth, like two-year-olds everywhere, were learning language. They were learning to think, to communicate, to express their feelings. The portraits show that the families assisted in the learning of language by caring for the children—by talking, listening, watching, showing, teaching, playing. They helped the children learn despite the daily stresses of too little money, the serious handicaps of too little schooling, too little power. Their ways of coping, their values formed the context for language learning. In this context Amy, Wendy, and Beth were already learning not to be sissies, they were learning to put up their fists, to talk back and refrain from talking back, to assert their wills, to share but also to defend their claims to objects and to challenge other people s claims. Surely two-yearolds from other backgrounds learn how to manage their feelings, how to assert themselves, when to be quiet, who has rights over which objects. But I doubt that the lessons are quite the same. If it turns out after much further study that children from South Baltimore use their considerable linguistic resources in different ways from children of more privileged backgrounds, if it turns out that they are more likely to assert, defend, defy, control their feelings, comply, or keep silent in certain situations, this will be the source of the differences: that one group needs to cope with the injuries of economic deprivation, while the other does not.

Direct Instruction in Language and Speaking The portraits suggest something of the range of interactions in which Amy, Wendy, and Beth participated. Interactions involving direct instruction in language and speaking were singled out for analysis, as the mothers themselves believed that teaching contributes importantly to language learning. In these interactions a caregiver explicitly told the child what to say or how to say it or quizzed her on these matters, using such teaching devices as elicited imita-

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152 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions tion, prompts, directions to ask or tell, and tutorial questions. This analysis revealed that mothers and other caregivers routinely gave direct instruction during the child's third year of life. Although there was substantial variation in the extent of direct instruction, several categories occurred in all three families. The most frequent of these involved naming people and things. These interactions were examined in detail, revealing both similarities and differences across children. Although Amy had the highest frequency of naming sequences, sequences occurred at least once per sample for each of the children. In every family the mother was the major teacher of names, but children as young as five years old also assumed this role. For all three children some naming sequences consisted of a single naming unit (a unit of discourse corresponding to each referent in question), while others consisted of long chains of units. Three types of naming units were identified according to the roles that speakers assumed in relation to one another: the caregiver requested a n a m e and the child responded; the child requested a n a m e and the caregiver responded; or the child volunteered a n a m e and the caregiver responded. Although the three types occurred in all three families, there was individual variation in the distribution of role relations. In addition, there was a dramatic developmental shift with respect to requests for names. In the early samples virtually all requests were made by caregivers. In the later samples requests by caregivers decreased and requests by the children increased until in the final samples the children m a d e virtually all of the requests for names. A closer look at naming sequences involving mothers as teachers revealed further similarities and differences. Only for Amy and Marlene was there enough evidence for a developmental analysis of naming sequences. This analysis revealed that Marlene s input was well adapted to Amy's level of understanding about naming and that Amy improved in her ability to produce the correct answer without her mother's prompts. By the sixth sample Amy was able to respond correctly to her mother's What-questions and to address What-questions to her mother. The families also gave instruction in speaking appropriately. A caregiver, usually the mother, drew the child into conversation or helped her formulate the correct response by giving her the appropriate line to say to the mother herself or to a third party. The children were instructed to perform a variety of speech acts which represented dimensions of compliance and self-assertion.

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In a special case of triadic interaction the mothers showed the child how to speak appropriately in pretend conversations with dolls. Instruction in what to say to "babies" was p a r t of more general instruction in how to care for "babies"—how to minister to their physical needs, entertain, teach, and comfort. Rhyming, singing, and playing verbal games was the fourth category of instructional interaction. This was a much less frequent category for Wendy and Beth than for Amy, who was frequently encouraged to rehearse "Pattycake," "Shot me a bear," "This little piggy went to market," and so on. The remaining categories of direct instruction occurred rarely. Each child received little if any instruction in using correct grammar, pronunciation, and intonation; counting, reciting the alphabet, and identifying colors; and making other kinds of responses. Various hypotheses were offered about what Amy, Wendy, and Beth learned from instructional sequences. These interactions were effective ways of transmitting various kinds of social and linguistic knowledge. The children learned about the mother/child relationship and about communication. They learned to name, to formulate What-questions, to speak appropriately in a variety of conversational contexts, and to rhyme, sing, and play verbal games. They learned self-assertion and compliance, vocabulary, and expressions of concern. Other studies suggest that the phenomenon of direct instruction is not confined to South Baltimore but occurs in other speech communities as well. Moreover, the results of this description are consistent with previous accounts—based on data from middleclass American children—of the development of linguistic reference, of play, and of various conversational skills. More work needs to be done in working-class communities and in other communities to gain a better understanding of the heuristic value of direct instruction—and of other language socialization strategies as well. Further study of direct instruction promises to extend our knowledge of various aspects of child language. In addition, direct instruction in language and speaking has implications for those who are responsible for the formal education of workingclass children. Here is a teaching strategy that is already wellestablished when the children are two years old; parents believe in it; and children participate enthusiastically. However else their values differ, parents and teachers might find some common ground in direct instruction.

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154 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions Combining Words to Express Meanings The third description focused on one of the major tasks of early language development—combining words to express meanings. It is the most technical of the three descriptions and involves the smallest unit of analysis, the utterance. Located more squarely than the other descriptions within the traditional study of child language, it involved a replication of past investigations with middleclass American children (Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975) and with French-speaking Canadian children (Lightbown 1977). There were two major findings concerning the compositional meanings that Amy, Wendy, and Beth expressed in their early sentences. First, these meanings could be accounted for by the same small set of categories that had been identified in previous studies involving children from a variety of cultures. That is, the categories of Existence, Negation, Recurrence, Action, Locative Action, Residual Action, Locative State, State, Notice, Intention, Attribution, and Possession adequately described the majority of semantic/syntactic relations in every sample. Second, Amy, Wendy, and Beth traversed a developmental sequence that closely resembled the sequence previously documented for middle-class American children and French-speaking Canadian children. While there were some differences, these were minor and existed against a background of striking similarity. The functional relations (Existence, Negation, Recurrence) occurred less frequently than the verb relations (Action, Locative Action, Locative State, State, Notice, Intention) and decreased proportionately across the eight samples. Action relations (Action, Locative Action, Residual Action) tended to be used productively before state relations (State, Locative State, Notice). Action was the most frequent single category in most of the samples, Existence tended to decline proportionately, and Possession was characterized by individual variation. Locative State, State, Notice, and Intention occurred infrequently, and Intention tended to emerge later than the other verb categories. The minor categories occurred very infrequently, with some (Dative, Time, Instrument, Causality) appearing only in the later samples, if at all. The results of this analysis contribute to the growing consensus that young children everywhere express a small n u m b e r of compositional meanings in their early sentences. Still unresolved is the question of why the same meanings occur in the same order. This apparent universal of child language has been explained as involving a complex interaction of factors, including cognitive accessibil-

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Summaries, Conclusions, Questions 155 ity, linguistic complexity, communicative usefulness, and frequency of exposure. Inter-relating Descriptions The preceding review of findings leaves us with descriptions of three different aspects of development. This raises two related questions. How do the findings relate to one another? And what is the place of each of the descriptions (portraits, analysis of direct instruction, analysis of compositional meanings) in an ethnographic account of language development? I do not have adequate answers to these questions. By juxtaposing three quite different kinds of description, I have, at best, exhibited the tensions among them. In addition, these descriptions, as they are ordered here (from child and family, to interaction, to utterance) suggest some ways in which the broader may serve as contexts for interpreting the more specific. PORTRAITS IN RELATION TO ANALYSES

Analyses display the intricacies of specific phenomena—in this case direct instruction and compositional meanings—which have been extracted from the dense stream of behavior. The portraits of the children and their families help us to relocate the analyses in the broader scheme of things, amidst shared values and practices. They serve as a reminder that direct instruction is one of many ways in which Amy, Wendy, and Beth learned language, that the acquisition of compositional meanings is one of many tasks which they encountered during the third year of life. The portraits also suggest issues for future analysis. For example, the children are described as exhibiting a variety of emotions, including joy, sympathy, jealousy, and anger. How young children learn to express or manage emotions is an important, neglected question in the study of child language. But the portraits are valuable not just as a check on the interpretation of analytic descriptions or as a source of ideas for additional analyses. Without qualitative forms of description one risks losing sight of some obvious truths: That words are uttered, acts performed, meanings made by particular children living and growing in particular families. That the experience of language learning in South Baltimore is entwined with all the other experiences of childhood in South Baltimore—just as it is in any human community. That these experiences abide by individual patterns no less than they abide by local and universal patterns. Qualitative forms

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156 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions of description demonstrate that there will always be patterns that cannot be fully disclosed, fully analyzed. Such descriptions do not exist to be transformed into analytic accounts but rather serve their own unique function. DIRECT INSTRUCTION IN RELATION TO COMPOSITIONAL MEANINGS

Turning now to the two analyses, one may ask whether the findings concerning direct instruction contribute to an understanding of the development of compositional meanings. Did Amy, Wendy, and Beth learn anything about compositional meanings from participating in interactions involving direct instruction? Surely, incidental learning about compositional meanings occurred in the context of these interactions just as it occurred in many other kinds of contexts. Perhaps the acquisition of compositional meanings occurs more easily when the child is repeatedly exposed to a particular kind of compositional meaning in a specific, recurring interactional context—for example, Action relations in rhyming sequences or in pretend conversations with dolls, What-that constructions in naming sequences. In addition, it is possible that the children were highly motivated to learn in instructional interactions. Through direct instruction, caregivers implicitly affirmed the importance of learning and directed the child's attention to those lessons that were important to learn. Interactions in which children are especially motivated to learn may promote the acquisition of various aspects of language, including compositional meanings. But clearly, Amy, Wendy, and Beth did not learn about compositional meanings from direct instruction per se. Caregivers did not explicitly teach them how to combine words to express meanings. No one instructed, "Say 'my,' say 'truck,' say 'my truck.'" Previous Studies of the Verbal Abilities of White Children from the Lower Classes In preceding chapters an attempt was made to relate the findings of the present study to what we know about child language in general. This meant comparing Amy, Wendy, and Beth to two-year-olds from other groups—middle-class American, French-Canadian, Kahili—groups that have been studied under relatively naturalistic conditions. It is much harder to relate the findings to the studies of children from the lower classes that were reviewed in Chapter 1.

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For one thing, Amy, Wendy, and Beth were much younger than the subjects of previous studies. Equally important, the present study involved a very different research strategy. Still, a few general points can be m a d e . First, the results of the present study lend no support to the claim that children from the lower classes are linguistically deprived. Although the debate about language deprivation centered on the interpretation of test results from school-aged children, the language deficit was said to originate in the child's early linguistic environment. Families from the lower classes were portrayed as failing to provide the most basic kinds of social, cognitive, and linguistic experience. The present study involved the first in-depth investigation of early language development within the family context and found no evidence for this highly stereotyped and negative view of poor families. Second, recent comparative studies have begun to identify dialect differences in children's speech. This question was not directly addressed in the present study, but it is clear that Amy, Wendy, and Beth were routinely exposed to various nonstandard forms, both lexical and grammatical. For example, they had already acquired the possessive verb got, as in "I got shoes." This is consistent with Garvey and Dickstein's (1970) finding for fifth-graders: the lowerclass group used got more frequently than did the middle-class group, who favored have. Other nonstandard forms used by Amy, Wendy, and Beth were ain't and don't, as in "It don't fit." Another major variable in recent comparative studies is norms of language use. The evidence from older children indicated that children from the lower classes tended to give less explicit verbal responses in certain situations. The dimension of explicitness is not relevant to the present study, as two-year-olds cannot be expected to be explicit. However, the present study begins to document the ways in which language was used by families from South Baltimore—to teach, to assert claims of ownership, to express concern, to be polite, to make requests, and so on. In other words, we are beginning to get a picture of the kinds of dialect forms and language contexts that children from one working-class community encountered in their own homes. This is important in its own right. But it also raises questions about formal education—an issue that traditionally has been of major concern to those who study children from the lower classes. Hymes (1971), speaking of the value of a theory of sociolinguistic description for understanding poor children, said that we need to describe the full range of settings that children encounter:

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158 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions . . . the major purpose would be to place the school setting in the context of other settings so as to delineate the true communicative abilities of the children and to show the extent to which the performance in school settings was not a direct disclosure of their abilities, but a product of the interference between the system that they bring and the system that confronts them; or a system simply largely irrelevant to the direction their abilities and competence otherwise took. In part the problem is one of a conflict of values and of perceived interests, (p. 61) The results of the present study begin to suggest some points of conflict between the systems of home and school. One of these involves language itself. It is not so much that the nonstandard forms that Amy, Wendy, and Beth were learning differ from the Standard English prescribed for classroom use, but rather that these forms are powerful social markers. It is to these features of speech that well-meaning "outsiders" referred when they urged me to "teach those people in South Baltimore to talk right." Another possible source of conflict, and one which is probably more important, concerns those contexts in which Amy, Wendy, and Beth were learning to talk back, assert themselves, defend, dispute. Will there be room in the classroom for these skills? Will children who know how to tease and challenge be regarded as discipline problems and slow learners, as Nora was? How can teachers be expected to take these differences into account, to sensitively socialize children to the norms of classroom interaction, when they are given far too few resources and assigned far too many children? But it is not only a matter of conflicts between home and school. As I suggested earlier, direct instruction is one area where the values of parent and teacher might overlap. (One wonders, though, how often teachers in overcrowded classrooms are able to do what Marlene, Liz, and Nora did every day, namely teach on a one-to-one basis a child whom they know intimately.) In addition, the mothers, despite their own lack of education, wanted the children to do well in school. Nora, who left school in the eighth grade and had not learned to read, bought books for Beth at the second-hand stores. Liz was beginning to teach Wendy how to count and to recite the alphabet. Amy was already eager to go to school and played school at home with the older children in her family. It is hard to imagine how anyone, growing up in this culture, could not care about being able to read and write. In any case, what is needed is further in-depth study of how working-class children and children

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of other social and ethnic origins use language in the contexts of home and school. One further point concerning previous research on social class and language development. In Chapter 1 we saw that a single research paradigm prevailed during the long history of research in this area: the less privileged were compared to the more privileged on a single occasion. In many of the studies the experimental conditions themselves placed the less privileged children at a disadvantage. However, as I have implied throughout, this does not mean that comparisons are inherently invidious. Rather, comparisons make sense only when they are grounded in descriptions of what individuals do under everyday conditions. In their crosscultural study of cognition, Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp (1971) developed a research strategy called "experimental anthropology" in which ethnographic and experimental approaches complemented each other. Ethnographic analysis preceded experimentation, providing the information necessary to design experiments that were culturally appropriate—in procedures, materials, and contexts. Ethnographic data also served as a final standard against which to judge the adequacy of the experimental conclusions. The present study represents a first step toward the kind of descriptions that are needed in order to design experiments that are appropriate for children from working-class communities. Research Strategy The research strategy employed in this study arose out of a tradition in which the typical study of early language development involved intensive observation of a small n u m b e r of children in their homes. It evolved into a more ethnographic approach in which an attempt was made to inquire into people s beliefs and values and to locate language learning in the broader context of daily life in South Baltimore. This way of doing research, unlike many other ways, entails prolonged and intimate association with the subjects. The description of design and methods in Chapter 2 implicates personal relationships but conveys little of the complexities involved. PERSONAL DIMENSIONS

From the beginning the situation was an odd one: the families and I would never have met were it not for the study. I came to them with a proposal, something / wanted to do, and they agreed to cooperate. I was surprised at how quickly they agreed. The decision

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160 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions seemed to be based on a number of factors: they were interested in the study, flattered that their children had been singled out, eager to have a sympathetic listener. Amy's mother had enjoyed participating in an earlier study (McConochie 1976). During the initial taping sessions the video equipment generated considerable interest from families and neighbors. Upon viewing the first video tape made in his home, B e t h s grandfather volunteered, "Poor families can make just as good a movies as in Hollywood. Yes sir, you just go on natural, you know what I mean? Like routine. They set out there in the kitchen and walk through the house just like everyday life. At the end of the picture say, 'Everyday life in a poor family' Arguin over food or some thin. See these people act natural. Go in the house and let her go about her everyday natural—'Life in an everyday home' or 'A poor family' Just say what you wanna say no matter what's in that film." He wanted me to make a film of him. The relationships that developed were diverse, shifting, h a r d to define. Gradually over the weeks and months of the study, we seemed more like friends. I was invited to birthday parties, baby showers, Tupperware parties. I drove mothers to the welfare office or across town to a relative s home. We went shopping together, to the local carnival. They came to a party at my house. During the last several months of data collection my sister Kathy assisted with the taping sessions. This meant that the families got to know my family, just as I had gotten to know theirs. At the end of the study the families came to my house every week or so to transcribe. In other words, I was the researcher (outsider) and they were the subjects (insiders); we became friends, then coworkers; still I was the researcher and they were the subjects. Although I tried to follow the same procedures at each taping session, no two sessions were the same. The extent of our interaction varied, depending on any number of factors: how well the mother and I got along, how well the child and I got along, whether any of us was in a particularly bad or tired or exuberant mood that day, whether friends or other members of the family were present, whether I could get the video equipment to work. Some days we had a good time. Some days I felt that I should not have been there—when things were going badly with a boyfriend, or a welfare check was late, or there were too many hours of overtime that week. At those times I was most keenly aware of my imposition and most doubtful that it was justified.

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Summaries, Conclusions, Questions 161 ETHICAL ISSUES

One may ask if it is ever justified to intrude upon families for the purpose of scientific observation. Certainly, this sort of study carries with it tremendous potential for abuse. Going into peoples homes to observe can become another form of injury, another surveillance. Video technology increases the risks, allowing us to make extremely detailed, permanent records—records that can be used against people. In advocating ethnographic research, I get stuck on these issues. With this kind of research the usual practice of obtaining informed consent provides only the bare m i n i m u m of protection. In an excellent discussion of ethnography in the private domain, Bryce (1980) raises the question of how to ethically disseminate findings obtained from participant-observation. Clearly, it is essential to make the findings available first to the families themselves. I was particularly concerned that the portraits, the most personal of the descriptions, not contain any material to which the families objected. In each case I read the portrait to the mother as a way of encouraging discussion. I also provided each family with a copy of the manuscript. Since Nora did not read easily, I read several sections to her. Later she told me that she and her family had been reading the manuscript, that she liked it very much, and that sometimes she had to "read between the lines" in order to understand. The feedback from Marlene and Liz was positive, and they too passed the manuscript around to other members of their families. It is also essential to preserve the anonymity of the families. I used pseudonyms throughout and altered some minor details in the portraits. These decisions were discussed with the mothers, some of whom argued for the use of real names, saying that they were proud of the tapes. In the interest of making known, of celebrating, a kind of community that had not been studied before, I retained the actual name of the neighborhood as well as various identifying d e t a i l s / T h e families assured me that they preferred it this way, that there was no need to fictionalize the community. I still have some doubts. One of the mothers disliked South Baltimore . . . At the beginning of the study I tried to think of ways of reciprocating for the families' participation in the study and decided to give them photographs of the children. At that point I could not foresee some of the other ways in which I would be able to reciprocate—by vouching, for example, for a parent who was under inves-

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162 Summaries, Conclusions, Questions tigation by the Department of Social Services, having been falsely accused of child abuse. Gradually, the issue of reciprocation became less important as the families assumed a more active role in the research enterprise itself. The subjects own active involvement is perhaps the best safeguard against abuse in ethnographic research. RESEARCH AS COLLABORATION BETWEEN RESEARCHERS AND FAMILIES

One point that I tried to be very clear about was that I was there to observe and learn. I was not trying to hasten language development or to tell anyone how to be a good parent. But by virtue of my status as a researcher, I was the recognized "expert." As the data collection progressed, I began to realize that the traditional conception of the "subject" was not adequate. The families had made a serious commitment to a long-term project. They developed a proprietary interest in the study. They had certain research skills that I lacked. In the transcription phase of the study Amy's Aunt Karen and Uncle Bruce, Wendy's mother Liz, and Beth's mother Nora became involved in the process of doing research and were paid for their work. Aside from the money, an additional benefit to the mothers was the chance to get out of the house. In transcribing, I worked most closely with Nora. She repeated Beth's utterances, and I wrote them down. In the process we began to talk about what was happening on the tapes. Nora had lots to say—laughing over this incident, worrying over that one, recalling what was happening in her life at the time of the taping, relating Beth's behavior then to her present behavior. By this time I had some specific questions to ask. I began to record Nora's comments. These records were invaluable to me in understanding the meaning of various behaviors. Asked after the transcription was finished what she thought of the study, Nora said, "I thought it was good for me. It was good for you. You're a higher speaker than 1.1 learn from you some of the words, and I use them at home a lot. And it's showin my daughter—well, she's young right now, she'll probably forget when she gets older—but it's showin her that I'm lettin somebody learn off of her. I tell her that at home . . . It's helpin me and helpin Beth and helpin you. And knowin I'm helpin somebody learn. And it makes me feel good in a way that I'm helpin somebody." Issues of transcription have become increasingly important in the study of child language (see, for example, Ochs 1979), and collaborative efforts between researcher and family seem particularly

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promising. In her work with the Kaluli, Schieffelin (1979a, \919b) developed the idea of the "annotated transcript" in which the transcript of spontaneous verbal interactions is expanded to include information about the cultural significance of the interactions. She too worked with the mothers in preparing the transcript. Later, another native assistant checked the accuracy of the transcript and provided still more information about the meanings of the recorded events. But transcription is only one task on which families and researchers might collaborate. In the present study the issue of direct instruction came from the mothers themselves and turned out to be a fruitful line of inquiry. One weakness of the study is that the families were not involved in analyzing the data and interpreting the results. What is needed in future studies of early language development is a broader conception of collaboration, along the lines suggested by Florio and Walsh (1976) and Kennedy (1977) for research in classroom settings. They proposed collaborative models of research in which teachers and researchers work together in every phase of the project—posing problems, carrying out the study, and making sense of the results. Applied to the study of early language development, this approach could be beneficial to researchers and families. By collaborating with families, researchers would gain a better understanding of child language, one that is enriched by the skills and insights of those who participate in language learning. By collaborating with researchers, families would receive recognition for what they already know, learn about the formal study of language development, and apply their skills toward an understanding of problems that are significant to them.

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Appendices

Appendix A Consent Form I agree to participate in, and to permit my child to participate in, a study of language development, conducted by Peggy Miller (a graduate student of psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University), with the understanding that: (1) The purpose of the study is to observe and describe how young children use language under ordinary circumstances. The intent is not to change my behavior or my child's behavior; (2) My child will be video-taped by P. Miller and an assistant in my home for about one hour every three weeks for several months. These tapes will record the child's speech and activities as she interacts routinely with family and/or friends. Scheduling of taping sessions will be made at my convenience; (3) I will be interviewed occasionally by P. Miller; these interviews will be audio-tape recorded; (4) I will receive photographs of my child taken throughout the study by P. Miller; (5) All tapes (video and audio) will be viewed, listened to, and analyzed only by P. Miller and a limited number of associates and only for educational and scientific research purposes; (6) The video and audio tapes will not be presented at scientific meetings or in public auditoriums, nor will they be broadcast or reproduced in any way without notice to me in writing, and only upon terms to which I agree; (7) I shall have the right to view all video tapes and listen to all audio tapes and to erase any of them and all copies of them; (8) I shall have the right to know of the existence of all copies of the video and audio tapes and their whereabouts. I may at any time require you to notify me of the number of copies of video and audio tapes in existence; (9) Neither I nor any m e m b e r of my family shall be identified by our actual names in any use made of the video or audio tapes. Signature of parent Signature of investigator

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166 Appendix D Appendix B Recording Equipment for Observation Sessions Sony Videorecorder AV3600 Sony Transistor Video Monitor CVM-950 Sony Camera AVC-1420 Sony TV zoom lens 122697 Sony Video Camera Power Unit AVC-1420 Sony Elevator Tripod VCT-20A Sony Dynamic Microphone, in microphone stand Sony V-30H video tapes Hitachi Cassette Recorder TRQ-33, as alternative source of audio (also used for interviews with mothers) Music audio tapes Note: Lighting equipment was not used, as I regarded it as too intrusive. Appendix C Toys for Observation Sessions The following four toys were introduced after the first forty minutes of each video session: One set of plastic nesting bowls (Playskool Nesting Bowls) One wooden dowel with four plastic "donuts" of varying shapes—two circular, one square, one triangular (Fisher-Price Creative Blocks) One doll clothed in pajamas and wrapped in a blanket (Baby Lisa, House of Dolls) One plastic dump truck (PP Heavy Hauler Truck) Several factors were considered in choosing these toys. First of all, I tried to select safe, sturdy toys of the sort that I had seen in the homes and toy stores of South Baltimore. (None of the subjects owned any of the above toys.) Second, previous experience with similar procedures had shown that too many toys can be overwhelming to the child. Since a twenty-minute play period was planned, four toys seemed a reasonable number. The toys were also selected with an eye to the range of possibilities for manipulative and symbolic play. The nesting bowls and dowel and donuts represent the manipulative end of the continuum. The doll and truck lend themselves more easily to symbolic play. Appendix D Transcription Procedures TRANSCRIPTION OF CHILD SPEECH

1. Investigators Transcript. A transcript of child speech was made as soon as possible after each taping session. In most cases I made the tran-

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Transcription Procedures 167 script; however, in several instances, the transcript was made by an assistant who had helped with the video taping and who knew the child. The transcript was made according to "Conventions for Transcribing Child Speech" (see below). 2. Family's Transcript. A member of the child's family made a transcript of all child speech recorded during each of the twelve taping sessions. The transcript was made according to the guidelines provided in "Conventions for Transcribing Child Speech" (see below). Amy's speech was transcribed by a teenaged aunt and uncle who lived with her. The mothers of the other subjects served as transcribers. Since Beth s mother could not read or write, the following procedure was used: Nora and I viewed the tapes together. She repeated each child utterance, which I then recorded in writing. In every case the transcribers started working after the final video taping session. This was done as a precaution: I did not want to draw undue attention to verbal behavior during the course of the data collection for fear that the transcribers might consciously or unconsciously alter their behavior with the children. 3. Final Child Speech Transcript. I used transcripts 1 and 2 as "drafts" in preparing the final transcript. The tapes were reviewed and the transcripts were repeatedly checked and revised. 4. Optional Check. Several of the transcripts of Wendy's speech were checked and corrected still another time by her mother, working with me. Beth s mother did the same with several of the transcripts of Beth s speech. This step was not needed in Amy's case, as her speech was less difficult to understand. VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

1. First Video Transcript. I or a trained assistant transcribed the video tapes in full, following "Conventions for Transcribing Video-Recorded Child Language Data" (see below). The video transcript includes: a. a record of the child's utterances; b. a description of the child's nonverbal behaviors; c. a record of the utterances of other persons present during the recording session; and d. the temporal coordination of (a), (b), (c), and (d). The record of child utterances (a) was taken from the previously completed child speech transcript. The video transcriber transferred the child utterances from the child speech transcript to the video transcript, adding certain punctuation marks and intonation symbols (see no. 2 of "Conventions for Transcribing Video-Recorded Child Language Data"). 2. Revision. After completing the first transcript, the video transcriber reviewed it from beginning to end, making necessary corrections, modifications, additions, etc. 3. Final Revision. I then checked and further revised the revised transcript.

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168 Appendix D ACCURACY AND RELIABILITY OF TRANSCRIPTS

The procedures detailed above comprise what might be called the method of successive approximations to an accurate, reliable transcript. (Bloom [1973] used a similar method in transcribing video tapes of her daughter's verbal and nonverbal behavior.) Several people successively viewed and listened to the tapes, confirming, revising, and adding to the transcripts. Each utterance and behavior was judged on at least two occasions by each of two people. Some one-hour transcripts went through nine revisions from the first child speech transcript through the final video transcript and required forty-five hours of work. I can see no alternative to this slow, painstaking process of construction and revision. Originally I intended to compute inter-transcriber reliability estimates of the child speech transcripts, but eventually abandoned this idea. The difficulty arose in finding a suitable second transcriber—someone whose transcript could be reasonably compared with my own. The families could not help with this step as they lacked the necessary technical training in speech transcription. An assistant who had such training lacked the necessary familiarity with the dialect and, specifically, with the speech of the three children. (Even the person who assisted with several of the tapings had far less exposure to the children's speech than I did, as I saw the families more frequently and did most of the video transcription.) In order to do an inter-transcriber reliability check in such a study, the investigator would need a partner, a person who has both technical training in child speech transcription and prolonged contact with the families. CONVENTIONS FOR TRANSCRIBING CHILD SPEECH

1. Record as accurately as possible each of the child's utterances; write only what you hear. 2. Use a pencil—it is often necessary to erase. 3. Write one utterance per line, in the order in which they were spoken. 4. Include two columns of utterances per page. 5. At the top of each column record the appropriate number from the counter of the video tape recorder. 6. Use a slash to indicate the end of an utterance: want cookie/ 7. If you cannot clearly hear an utterance or if you cannot decipher the utterance, use the following symbol: 8. Sometimes the child makes sounds that are not sentences. For example, she laughs, cries, screams, fusses, etc. In such cases, write the word and enclose it in parentheses, as follows: no!/ I want this/ (cries) 9. Errors to avoid.

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a. Sounds and words that are often inaccurately recorded (i.e., omitted when they actually occurred or added when they actually did not occur): (1) plural -5 toys (2) contraction of is, has, etc. it'5 on; there'5 a tiger; she's done it (3) it it goes there (4) -ing Mommy going (5)-ed I jumped (6) here Mommy stand baby here (7) some want some soda (8) the there the truck (9)1 / play toys b . Sounds and words that are often confused with one another: (1) rYand that there it is vs. there that is (2) -ing and me you getting cookie vs. you get me cookie I got it vs. I get it (3) past tense and present tense (4) mine and one I see one vs. I see mine 10. At the top of each page put the following headings: RIGHT corner Example: Page n u m b e r 1. N u m b e r of tape AMY X Date of taping 1/31/76 LEFT corner Example: Date of transcription Transcribed 8/9/76 Name of transcriber Karen CONVENTIONS FOR TRANSCRIBING VIDEO-RECORDED CHILD LANGUAGE DATA

1. Objectives. The aim is to transcribe all speech by the child (column 4) and to the child or within her hearing (column 5), to describe the accompanying nonverbal behaviors of the child (columns 1, 2, 3) and of other speakers (column 6), and to record information about the context in which the verbal and nonverbal behaviors occur (column 6). The temporal ordering of utterances and nonverbal behaviors is represented as follows: utterances or behaviors occurring simultaneously appear on the same line; utterances or behaviors occurring successively appear on successive lines. The format is illustrated below. 1 child behaviors

2 gaze

3 pointing

4 child speech

5 others' speech

N: Baby's cry in/

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6 context & behaviors of other speakers N gestures toward doll on floor

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170 Appendix D walking tow. doll kneeling down next to doll

doll

doll

cry/

doll

doll

it's my baby/

2. Transcription of Child Speech (Column 4). a. Utterances which succeed each other immediately— with no change in accompanying nonverbal behaviors—follow each other on the same line. 1 carrying book to sofa

2 book

3

4 book/read/

If there is any change in nonverbal behaviors, the utterances appear on different lines. 1 carrying book to sofa handing book to L

2 book L

3

4 book/ read/

b . A slash (/) is used to indicate an utterance boundary. The boundary is determined by length of pause before the next utterance and by its apparent terminal contour. This judgment is sometimes difficult to make. look m o m m y / c. When a child utterance has rising intonation, it is followed by a rising arrow ( f ) rather than a question mark. that yours f / d. For Wh-questions, a question mark is used, where truck?/ e. When an utterance is exclamatory, it is followed by an exclamation mark. hi skunk!/ f. A pause within an utterance is indicated by a raised dot (•)• take • ice cream/ g. A colon (:) is used to indicate that an utterance or word is drawn out. stop:/ h. A curving arrow is used when there is some kind of utterance boundary but the utterance sounds unfinished, such as when the child is counting or listing. 1/ 2/ 3/ i. An utterance may be followed by falling arrow ( | ) when it is important to emphasize the fact that the utterance has falling terminal contour, my coat | / my coat 11

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j . When a child suddenly interrupts her own utterance—apparently leaving the utterance unfinished—a dash ( ) indicates the abrupt stop. give me / k. When a child interrupts her own utterance apparently to change or correct it, a "self correct" symbol (s/c) is used. Mommy cookie/ w a n n a s/c 1. An unintelligible utterance or portion of an utterance is indicated by three hyphens ( ). Guesses about the form of unintelligible utterances are followed by a question mark and enclosed in parentheses above the utterance. (get blanket?) ---/ m. Vocalizations such as the following are included in parentheses in column 4: laugh, whisper, cry, whimper, whine, yell, grunt. 3. Transcription of Others' Speech (Column 5). a. The speaker is identified by initial 4 5 want monkey/ L: He's in the bedroom/ When several people are engaged in conversation simultaneously, it may be necessary to identify both speaker and addressee. 4 5 L to P: Yeah/She bought me that dress/ eat cookie/ R to Child: Baby's eating the cookie/ L to P: The red one?/ b. Rules b - m of no. 2 above are followed. c. Another speaker's misinterpretation of the form of a child's utterance is indicated with a check. 4 5 give me that/ P: Give Mommy t h a t ? / / 4. Description of Nonverbal Child Behaviors (Column 1). a. For each child utterance the accompanying nonverbal behavior is described. Nonverbal behaviors include actions, gestures, and facial expressions. The description of the nonverbal behavior should begin on the same line as the child utterance. Often the child engages in more than one nonverbal behavior while producing a single utterance. In such cases, separate the simultaneous nonverbal behaviors by commas. 1 2 3 4 stands next to toy bag, toy bag I do it/ a r m s raised over head, smiling

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172 Appendix D squatting, toy bag in there/ putting several toys into bag b. Start a new behavior or cluster of behaviors on a new line. It is best to skip a line or two between successive behaviors. This makes for a much clearer segmenting of behaviors. 1 2 3 4 putting imaginary N toys/ toys into toy bag, still holding doll bending down again

NOT: N

put em/

putting imaginary toys/ toys into toy bag, still holding doll, bending down again put em/ It is not always possible to skip a line or two between successive utterances, as when many behaviors and utterances occur quickly. In such cases, where it is necessary to clarify that two behaviors occurred successively, separate them by a semicolon. 1 2 3 4 putting imaginary N toys/ toys into toy bag, still holding doll; bending down again put em/ c. Segment nonverbal behaviors precisely, relative to the timing of the utterance. Did the utterance occur as the child was (1) walking toward the toy bag; (2) approaching the toy bag; (3) standing next to the toy bag? Did the utterance occur before, during, or after the child picked up the bottle? d. Also keep a running account of nonverbal child behaviors that occur in the absence of vocalizations. 1 puts nesting bowls together takes nesting bowls apart picks up truck e. The abbreviation (gs) is used for gestures followed by a description of the type of gesture. Exception: pointing, see no. 6 below. 1 2 3 4 (gs) extends arm D baby blanket/ toward D who is holding blanket f. The exact repetition of a nonverbal behavior is indicated by X enclosed in parentheses.

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Transcription Procedures 1 holding book in lap (X)

2 book book

3

173

4 see doggie/ Mommy/

5. Direction of Child's Gaze (Column 2). a. The following set of symbols is used. gaze directed toward person: person's initial gaze directed toward object: full or abbreviated n a m e of object gaze directed toward camera: • gaze directed downward, no further specification possible: I gaze directed upward, no further specification possible: \ gaze directed toward left side of screen, no further specification possible: «gaze directed toward right side of screen, no further specification possible: —» gaze directed toward front of screen, no further specification possible: f gaze directed toward back of screen, no further specification possible: shifting gaze, no further specification possible: ~ shifting gaze, specification possible—two or more symbols vertically placed: 1 2 3 4 taking doll from N sr N "\ give doll/ ^doll* direction of gaze can't be determined: ? b. Direction of gaze is noted for each utterance. This notation indicates the direction of gaze that accompanies the utterance. Direction of gaze also may be noted in the absence of child speech, as, for example, when a child silently shifts gaze to a speaker who addresses her.

1 arranging nesting bowls

pouring imaginary substance from one nesting bowl to another

2 nb's

K nb's

3

4 make dinner/

5 K: What are you making?/

make Lori dinner/

6. Direction of Pointing (Column 3). The symbols listed in no. 5 are used in column 3 to indicate direction of pointing. 1 2 3 4 5 standing next to L L there gum/ L: Where?/ (X) sofa sofa there/

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174 Appendix E 7. Context and Nonverbal Behaviors of Other Speakers (Column 6). Follow rules given in no. 4 above. Direction of pointing is indicated here. Direction of gaze is optional. Column 6 is less detailed than column 1. Since the camera is always focused on the child, other speakers are sometimes offcamera. Consequently their nonverbal behaviors are often not describable. 4 5 6 M: Put that one on here/ M points to plastic "donut" holding dowel with other hand do it/ M: On here/push it M helps A thread donut down/ That's right/ onto dowel Contextual information (e.g., outside noise to which the child responds) is also included in column 6. 8. Descriptive Terms. The following list includes frequently used descriptive terms: a. Inspect: to explore visually. b. Examine: to explore visually and manually. c. Extend: to hold out arm at shoulder level, with or without an object; often an object is extended toward someone in a "display" or "showing" gesture. d. Give: to transfer an object from the giver's hand to a recipient.

Appendix E Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Relations: Definitions and Examples The definitions of the semantic/syntactic categories are very similar to those used by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977). The examples are drawn from the transcripts of the present study. Each child is identified by her initial. THE MAJOR CATEGORIES

The major categories include the functional relations (Existence, Negation, Recurrence); the verb relations (Action, Locative Action, Residual Action, Locative State, State, Notice, Intention); and the categories of Possession and Attribution. Existence. Utterances in this category point out or name a person or object. In the earliest samples the children used the simple form schwa, as in "9 cat." Other common forms include the, that, this, here, there in combination with the name of the referent. In the later samples the children began to embed other kinds of relations (e.g., Possession) in these constructions.

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Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Examples: AI A reaches for brush. A pulls hair from brush. WV W pointing to ashtray. BVII B gestures toward barrette.

Relations

175

9 hair/ that ashtray/ that my barrette/

Negation. Utterances refer to the nonexistence or disappearance of an object or person, to the cessation of an event, to rejection or prohibition, or to the denial of an assertion. Most of the utterances in this category include a negative marker such as no, not, huh uh, don't, or ain't. The original definition given by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977) was revised slightly to include a small group of utterances that did not include a negative marker but clearly referred to the nonexistence or disappearance of a person or object. These utterances occurred in the early samples: the children searched for, asked for, or commented on a missing object. Examples: AVIII A holding several nesting bowls in her a r m s . WV Peggy: Do you want some meat?/

don't drop this over here/

want no meat/ BI

B has been searching for doll's bottle. B looking at mother.

m m 3 bottle f /

Recurrence. These utterances refer to another instance of an object, person, or event. The most frequent form is more. Other forms include other, another, and again. Examples: AVI A has put shoe on foot. A putting shoe on other foot.

other foot/

WVIII

W picks up spoon that had chocolate icing on it.

I want more chocolate/

BI

B picks up another doll and puts it aside.

more baby/

Action. Utterances in this category refer to actions such as eating, rocking, playing, doing, making, buckling, and helping in which the goal is not to change the location of a person or object. Most of the utterances refer to transitive actions which involve an affected object (e.g., m o m m y fixing a toy) but some refer to intransitive actions which do not involve an affected object (e.g., child dancing). At least two of the constituents (agent, action, object) must be expressed in order for the utterance to be classified as Action.

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176 Appendix E Examples: AVIII A diapers doll. A taking doll to mother. WIV W sits with book in lap. W turns pages. BVI B adjusts doll's blanket. B rocks doll in arms.

baby poop/ u m I read this/ rock baby/

Locative Action. These utterances refer to actions whose goal is a change in the location of a person or object. Again both transitive and intransitive locative actions are included. That is, some locative actions entail an affected object (e.g., child putting a piece of candy into a cup) and some do not (e.g., child going to store). At least two constituents (agent, locative action, object, place) must be expressed in order for the utterance to be included here. Examples: AI WIV BI

A placing doll in bed of truck. W putting doll into bag. Doll falls from B's arms.

doll 9 truck/ I put em over here/ she fall/

Residual Action. This category was not included among the original "major categories" identified by Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and Lightbown (1977). The present study used video recordings rather than audio recordings, thereby allowing for a closer examination of movements in relation to utterances. As a result, a small group of utterances was identified which could not be unequivocally assigned to the Action category, as opposed to the Locative Action category. These utterances included the verb ride. It was unclear whether the child referred to a locative action (putting a doll into a truck, mounting a bicycle) or an action (pushing the truck, pretending to ride a bicycle). Rather than force these utterances into one of the original categories, I kept them separate in the Residual Action category. Utterances in this category occurred more frequently for Beth than for the other children. Examples: BI

Bill

WV

B picks up doll and turns toward truck. B places doll in truck. B pushes truck. B stands next to stationary bike, holding doll on bike. W putting truck on floor. W puts doll in truck. W pushes truck.

baby ride truck/

my baby ride/

3 baby ride/

Locative State. These utterances refer to the relationship between a person or object and its location where no movement has occurred imme-

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Categories of Semantic/Syntactic

Relations

111

diately before, during, or after the utterance. At least two of the constituents (object, person, locative state, place) must be expressed. Examples: AIII WV BII

A points to room where stroller is kept. W gestures toward downstairs. Mother: Where's your little baby?/ B leans toward doll.

9 stroller in there/ her downstairs/

here is/

State. Utterances in this category refer to transitory internal states of people, animals, or pretend animate beings such as dolls and stuffed animals. Also included in this category are utterances which refer to external states of affairs. Examples: AV WV BVII

A pausing in dark hallway. W approaches Peggy, addresses her. B dips stick into bowl. B feeds doll with stick.

it dark/ I want piece 3 meat/ baby hungry | /

Notice. Utterances in this category refer to the relationship between an observer and a person, t h i n g / o r event observed. Also included are utterances in which the child draws another person's attention to something that she sees or hears. Originally, utterances had to include a verb of notice such as see, hear, or watch in order to be included in this category (see Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood 1975; Lightbown 1977). But in the present study it was possible (with video recordings) to identify a small set of Amy s utterances which did not include the notice verb. These utterances consisted of the n a m e of the person whose attention Amy sought and the n a m e of the referent which she wanted the other person to attend to. Three types of evidence indicated that these utterances belong in the Notice category: (1) Amy looked at the person whose attention she sought; (2) she held, touched, or stood next to the observed object but did not perform any other action such as giving the object; (3) these utterances were sometimes produced immediately before or after utterances in which the notice verb was expressed. For example, in the fifth sample Amy said "Peggy doggie" as she held a stuffed dog and looked at me. Then, still looking at me, she said "look doggie." Both of these utterances were assigned to the Notice category. Examples: AVIII

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A paging through magazine, looking at M. A looking at picture in magazine. A points to picture.

Marlene Leroy/ look Leroy/

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178 Appendix E WIV BIV

W spinning, monkey in hand. B looking from cat to mother, pointing to cat.

oh watch me I see mommy see pussy cat/

Intention. Utterances in this category refer to actions or events that the child desires or intends (and which often occur immediately after the utterance). These utterances include an intention verb and a main verb. Common intention verbs are wanna, gotta, gonna, and lemme. Examples: AVII WVII BVII

Mother offers photo to A A accepting photo. W sitting on sofa. W moves closer to Peggy B playing with nesting bowls. B "feeds" mother.

lemme see her/ I wanna sit here/ I gotta cook/

Possession. Utterances in this category refer to a relationship of possession between a person and an object. These utterances may include possessive pronouns such as my, mine, your, her or the possessor's name (with or without the possessive -5) in combination with the name of the possessed object, e.g., "Judy('s) cup." When the child omits the possessive -5, the utterance is sometimes ambiguous. For example, if a child says "mommy pocketbook" while mommy is opening her pocketbook, it is unclear whether the utterance should be coded Possession (pocketbook belongs to mommy) or Action (mommy opens the pocketbook). Also included in this category are utterances which include the possessive state verbs got and have. Examples: AVII WI BVI

A sitting on sofa, finger in mouth, has gum in mouth. W picks up cord to headphone. Mother: No, it ain't your baby. It's my baby. B kneeling down next to P's doll.

I got a piece 3 gum/ my string/

that Peggy baby/

Attribution. Utterances in this category encode relationships of qualification or specification. They distinguish among instances of a class of objects, according to such dimensions as color, shape, size, number, attractiveness; refer to inherent properties; or include deictic elements embedded in verb relations.

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Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Examples: All Will

BVIII

A has been cavorting in bare feet. W and mother are looking at picture of Cinderella's stepmother. B picks up can of head spray for video recorder. B sets it on coffee table.

Relations

179

my feet dirty/ her mean/

put this can here/

THE MINOR CATEGORIES The minor categories include Wh-Question, Place, Vocative, Performative, Stereotype, Rhyme/Routine, Other, and Equivocal/Undetermined. These categories generally occurred much less frequently than the major categories. The category Other includes several even smaller categories. Wh-Question. Utterances in this category include question words such as what, where, who, and when. Examples: AVI WIV

A touches button on back of sofa. W approaching mother, looking at her.

what's that?/ where s ninny?/

Place. This category includes multi-word utterances in which location alone is expressed or in which location is expressed in combination with another relation. Examples: AVIII

BIV

A walks to other end of sofa and sets truck down. B standing next to bicycle. B gestures toward bicycle.

over here/

I play here/

Vocative. These are utterances in which the person addressed is named.

Examples: AVIII BVI

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A has just lost her gum, addressing mother. B leans over doll, addressing it. B gets bottle. B pretends to give pill to doll.

ma, give piece gum/ want a pill, baby f /

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180 Appendix E Performative. Utterances in this category perform an action. Most typically they mark exchanges between two people. For example, the child says "here yours" as she hands a cup to a friend. Examples: AVI WIV

A giving chip to Peggy. W giving doll and dog to mother.

here chip/ here m o m m y /

Stereotype. Utterances in this category seem to be unanalyzed units. Examples include piece e gum, look e here, thank you, ice cream, and kitty cat. Examples: WI

BVI

Mother: Go get the stroller and put your baby in the stroller. B writing on paper.

wait a minute/ like this/

Rhyme/Routine. These utterances are fragments of rhymes or songs, routines such as "ready, set, go," and countings such as " 1 , 2, 3." Examples: AIV WVI

A clapping hands. W making doll do pattycake.

pattycake roll it/ pattycake oh pattycake baker man/

Other. Utterances in this category fall into several smaller categories: (1) Greeting. Utterances which mark arrivals or departures and include words such as hi, hello, and goodbye. Examples: WVIII WVIII

Pat enters room. W puts pocketbook on her a r m and pretends to leave.

hi Pat/ so long m o m m y /

(2) Affirmation. Utterances which include words of affirmation or agreement such as yeah and OK. Examples: AVIII

A extends foot toward Peggy. Peggy: Do you want me to buckle it?/ yeah, buckle it/

BVIII

Mother: Give it to me/ B gives b a n a n a peel to mother.

OK m o m m y /

(3) Time. Utterances which include adverbs of time.

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Categories of Semantic/Syntactic Example: BVII

B pretends to cook. B looks at mother.

Relations

181

not done yet/

(4) Manner. Utterances which include adverbs that indicate the manner in which an action is performed. Example: AVI AVI

A swings stuffed bear. A arranging blocks.

fix

do like that/ 9 like that/

(5) Dative. Utterances which specify the recipient or benefactor of an action. Example: WVIII

W has been looking for Tommys sunglasses.

I w a n n a give em Tommy/

(6) Instrument. Utterances which specify the instrument that is used to perform an action. Example: BVI

B drawing with pen on paper.

draw this pen/

(7) Conjunction. Utterances which include a conjunction to connect two or more units (words, clauses). Example: BVI

B leaning over doll that is wearing a coat and hat.

coat and hat/

(8) Causality. Utterances which refer to causal actions. Example: BVII

B feeding doll with spoon.

make baby eat/

(9) Identity. Utterances which refer to a person's role or identity. Example: BVII

B holding sunglasses. baby movie star/ B puts sunglasses on doll. Equivocal/Undetermined. Utterances in this category could not be assigned to one of the other categories. In some cases the utterance was ambiguous in its meaning, and in other cases the utterance bore no discernible relation to the child's behavior or to other features of context. Examples: WI

Bill

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W moves small cup to doll. W gives doll a drink. B sitting on table, looking at Peggy, no dress present.

baby cup/

that my dress/

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. 1976. Processes of language teaching and training in the interactions of mother-child dyads. Child Development 47: 1064-1078. Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38 (1-2) (serial no. 149). . 1974. Concept, word, and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review 81: 2 6 7 - 2 8 5 . . 1975. Individual differences in early semantic and syntactic development. In D. Aronson and R. Rieber (eds.), Developmental psycholinguistics and communication disorders. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Ninio, A., and J. Bruner. 1978. The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language 5: 1-15. Nutter, D. 1970. Rowhouse South Baltimore. Baltimore: Report of the Baltimore City Planning Department. April. Ochs, E. 1979. Transcription as theory. In E. Ochs and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.), Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Ochs, E., and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.) 1979. Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Omar, M. K. 1970. The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a native language. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University. Park, T. Z. 1974. A study of German language development. MS. Berne, Switzerland: Psychological Institute. Peisach, E. C. 1965. Children's comprehension of teacher and peer speech. Child Development 36: 4 6 7 - 4 8 0 . Piaget, J. 1951. Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. New York: Ballantine. . 1954. The construction of reality in the child. New York: Ballantine. Rackstraw, S. J., and W. P. Robinson. 1967. Social and psychological factors related to variability of answering behaviour in five-year-old children. Language and Speech 10: 88-106. Ramer, A. L. H. 1976. Syntactic styles in emerging language. Journal of Child Language 3: 4 9 - 6 2 . Robinson, W. P. 1965. The elaborated code in working class language. Language and Speech 8: 2 4 3 - 2 5 2 . Rocissano, L. 1979. Object play and its relation to language in early childhood. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Ryan, J. 1974. Early language development: Towards a communicational analysis. In M. P..M. Richards (ed.), The integration of a child into a social world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sankoff, G. 1974. A quantitative paradigm for the study of communicative competence. In R. Bauman and J. Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B. B. 1978. A sociolinguistic analysis of a relationship. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Los Angeles, November. . 1979a. Getting it together: An ethnographic approach to the study

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190 References of the development of communicative competence. In E. Ochs and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.), Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. . 1979&. How Kaluli children learn what to say, what to do, and how to feel: An ethnographic study of the development of communicative competence. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. (To be published by Cambridge University Press.) Schiff, N. 1976. The development of form and meaning in the language of hearing children of deaf parents. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Schlesinger, I. 1971. Production of utterances and language acquisition. In D. Slobin (ed.), The ontogenesis of grammar. New York: Academic Press. Shriner, J. H., and L. Miner. 1968. Morphological structures in the language of disadvantaged and advantaged children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 11: 605-610. Slobin, D. 1973. Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In C. A. Ferguson and D. I. Slobin (eds.), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Slobin, D. (ed.) 1967. A field manual for cross-cultural study of acquisition of communicative competence. Berkeley: University of California. Snow, C. E. 1977a. The development of conversation between mothers and babies. Journal of Child Language 4: 1-22. . \911b. Mothers' speech research: From input to interaction. In C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Talking to children: Language input and acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snow, C. E., A. Arlman-Rupp, Y. Hassing, J. Jobse, J. Joosten, and J. Vorster. 1976. Mothers' speech in three social classes. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 5: 1-20. Solberg, M. E. 1971. The development of early syntax and sound in a polysynthetic Andean language: The ontogenesis of Quechua. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University. Stewart, W. A. 1970. Toward a history of American Negro dialect. In F. Williams (ed.), Language and poverty: Perspectives on a theme. Chicago: Markham. Stross, B. 1969. Language acquisition by Tenejapa Tzeltal children. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Templin, M. C. 1957. The development and interrelationships of certain language skills in children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tolbert, K. 1971. Pepe Joy: Learning to talk in Mexico. MS. Trevarthen, C. 1979. Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. In M. Bullowa (ed.), Before speech: The beginning of interpersonal communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van der Geest, T., R. Gerstel, R. Appel, and B. Th. Tervoort. 1973. The child's communicative competence. The Hague: Mouton.

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Ward, M. C. 1971. Them children: A study in language learning. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Williams, R, and R. C. Naremore. 1969a. Social class differences in children's syntactic performance: A quantitative analysis of field study data. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 12: 7 7 8 - 7 9 3 . . \969b. On the functional analysis of social class differences in modes of speech. Speech Monographs 36: 77-102. Young, F. M. 1941. An analysis of certain variables in a developmental study of language. Genetic Psychology Monographs 23: 3-141.

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Name Index

Anastasiow, N. J., 19, 183 Appel, R., 17, 190 Arlman-Rupp, A., 15, 122-123, 129, 190 Baldwin, A. L., 13, 15, 16, 17, 183 Baldwin, C. R, 13, 15, 16,17,183 Baratz, J. C , 7,12,183 Beer, C , 47,183 Bellugi, U., 27, 184 Berko, J., 27, 183 Bernstein, B., 2 3 - 2 4 , 26,183 Black, M. H., 13,183 Blake, I. K., 30,183 Bloom, B. S., 13, 184 Bloom, L., 28, 29, 45, 46, 50, 95, 97, 132-133, 137-138, 140, 142,144-148, 154, 168,174-177, 184,187 Blount, B. G., 29, 184 Blurton-Jones, N., 30, 184 Bowerman, M., 28, 29,146,184,185 Braine, M. D. S., 27, 184 Brown, R., 27, 28, 9 7 - 9 8 , 119, 132-133, 137,147,184,185 Bruck, M., 20, 25,185 Bruner, J. S., 12, 98, 125, 185,189 Bryce, J., 161, 185 Cazden, C. B., 7,12, 27,185 Chomsky, N., 27, 29, 185 Cole, M., 12,159, 185 Coles, J. H., 14, 185 Coles, R., 13, 14, 185 Cowan, R A., 16, 185 Cross, X G., 99,185 Davis, A., 13, 184 Davis, E. A., 7, 185 Day, E. J., 7,10,186 Deutsch, M. R, 12,13,186 Dickstein, E., 19, 157, 186 Ervin, S., 27, 188. See also Ervin-Tripp, S.

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Ervin-Tripp, S., 28, 186. See also Ervin, S. Fiess, K., 29, 184 Florio, S., 163, 186 Fraser, C , 27, 185 Gadlin,H., 31-32, 186 Garvey, C , 18-19, 28, 109,157,186 Gay, J., 159, 185 Gerstel, R., 17, 190 Glick, J. A., 130-131,159,185,186 Glucksberg, S., 25,186 Graves, Z.R., 130-131, 186 Gray, S. W., 12,187 Guillaume, P., 27, 186 Haines, M. L., 19, 183 Halliday, M. A. K., 28, 99, 186 Harris, A. E., 126, 186 Harris, M., 37 Hassing, Y., 15, 122-123, 129, 190 Hawkins, P. R., 24, 186 Henderson, D., 24, 186 Hess, R. D., 12,13, 184, 187 Higgins, E. T, 14, 25,186, 187 Hill, C. A., 24, 187 Hoddinott, B. A., 16, 185 Holzman, M., 15, 122, 187 Hood, L., 28, 29, 46, 50, 95, 97,128, 132-133, 137-138, 140,142, 144-148, 154,174-177,184,187 Houston, S. H., 12,187 Hunt, J. M. V, 13,187 Hymes, D., 5, 28, 157, 187 Ingle, G., 31-32, 186 Jobse, J., 15,122-123,129,190 John, V P., 12,187 Joosten, J., 15,122-123,129,190

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194

Name

Index

Kean, J. M., 22,188 Keenan, E. O., 125, 187. See also Ochs, E. Keller, S., 12,13,187 Kennedy, C , 163, 187 Kernan, K., 29, 187 Klaus, R. A., 12,187 Klein, J., 16,185 Kraus, R., 25, 186 Labov, W, 12,187 LaCivita, A. E, 22,188 Lahey, M., 29,184 Lawton, D., 24,188 Leacock, E. B., 12, 26, 188 Leonard, L. B., 29,144-147,188 Leopold, W, 27, 188 Lieven, E. V ML, 29, 188 Lifter, K., 29, 184 Lightbown, P. M., 28, 29, 46, 50, 132-133, 137-138, 140, 142, 144-148, 154,174-177,184,188 McCarthy, D., 7-12, 27, 188 McConochie, R. M., 14, 31, 37, 97,125, 130,160, 188 McFarlane, P. X, 18, 186 McGrew, W. C , 30, 188 Macnamara, J., 28, 188 McNeill, D., 29, 188 Miller, P., 77, 188 Miller, W, 27,188 Miner, L., 22,190 Mitchell-Kernan, C , 28, 186 Moerk, E. L., 122,188 Naremore, R. C , 16-17, 24-25,191 Nelson, K., 28, 29,189 Ninio, A., 98, 189 Nutter, D., 3,189 Ochs, E., 28, 162, 189. See also Keenan, E. O. Omar, M. K., 29, 189

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Park, T. Z., 29,189 Peisach, E. C , 21,189 Piaget, J., 28,147, 189 Rackstraw, S. J., 24,189 Ramer, A. L. H., 29, 189 Robinson, W. P., 24, 189 Rocissano, L., 95,109,184,189 Ryan, J., 126, 189 Sankoff, G., 26, 189 Schieffelin, B . B . , 28, 29, 31,114, 120-121,123,128,163,187,189,190 Schiff, N., 29,190 Schlesinger, I., 28,190 Sharp, D. W, 159, 185 Shipman, V C , 12,13,187 Shriner, J. H., 22,190 Slobin, D., 29,190 Snow, C. E., 15, 99,122-123,125-126, 129,148,190 Solberg, M. E., 29,190 Stewart, W. A., 12, 190 Stross, B., 29, 190 Templin, M. C , 8-11, 190 Tervoort, B. Th., 17, 190 Tolbert, K., 137,190 Trevarthen, C , 126, 190 Tucker, G. R., 20, 25,185 Van der Geest, T., 17, 190 Vorster, J., 15, 122-123, 129, 190 Walsh, M., 163,186 Ward, M. C , 14, 123, 191 Weber, J., 16, 185 Williams, E, 16-17, 2 4 - 2 5 , 1 9 1 Yamamoto, K., 22,188 Young, E M., 7, 191

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Subject Index

Adult interpretation of child's intention, 125-128 Assertive behavior, 102-105, 121 Black American children, language development of, 7, 12-15,16,18-19, 21, 27, 30 Caregiver beliefs, 5 3 - 5 9 , 6 1 - 6 5 , 6 8 - 7 2 , 73, 150-151 Caregiver-child relationships. See Family-child relationships Caregiver speech. See Adult interpretation of child's intention; Direct instruction in language and speaking; Linguistic input Child language, 4, 2 7 - 3 0 ; and Chomsky's theory, 27; and cognitive perspective, 28; and lack of studies of children of varying socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, 31-32; and pragmatic perspective, 28. See also Cross-cultural perspectives on child language; Individual variation in child language Child speech samples, general description of, 4 3 - 4 5 Compliant behavior, 99-102 Compositional meanings, 6, 132-149, 154-156; cross-cultural comparisons of, 133,137-138; definitions of categories for, 48,174-181; explanations for developmental sequence of, 146-149; individual variation in, 143; procedures for analyzing, 4 6 - 5 0 Concern, expressions of, 109-114 Conversation: as context for acquisition of compositional meanings, 148; as context for learning names, 9 7 - 9 9 ; development of, 99-114,124-128 Cross-cultural perspectives on child language: in cross-cultural studies, 13-15, 29, 114, 120-124, 133,

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137-138; and ethnographic approach, 31, 3 7 - 5 0 , 159; and social class comparisons within framework of cross-cultural comparisons, 31 Description, 3; forms of, 5, 4 0 - 5 0 ; relationships among forms of, 155-156. See also Portraits of the children and their families Dialect, 3 6 , 1 8 - 2 1 , 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 Direct instruction in language and speaking, 5 - 6 , 73-131,151-153, 155-158; categories of, 77; crosscultural comparisons of, 114, 120-124; definition of, 75; educational implications of, 153, 157-158; enthusiastic participation of children in, 82, 121, 127; mothers' beliefs about, 73; procedures for analyzing, 4 5 - 4 6 ; and triadic interactions, 99, 105, 120. See also Elicited imitation as a teaching device Educational implications of findings, 153,157-159 Elicited imitation as a teaching device, 74, 77-121, 128-129 Ethical issues, 3 7 - 3 8 , 1 6 1 - 1 6 2 , 165 Ethnographic approach, 31, 3 7 - 5 0 , 159 Everyday conditions. See Naturalistic observation Expression of emotion, 150-151, 155 Family-child relationships, 8, 13-15, 35, 5 1 - 7 2 , 124, 150-151, 155-157. See also Portraits of the children and their families Grammar, rules of, 27 Grammatical morphemes, 2 2 - 2 3

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196

Subject

Index

Individual variation in child language: in compositional meanings, 143, 145-146; in direct instruction, 77, 78, 87, 9 4 - 9 5 , 99,114,129-131; in mothers' style of play, 129-130; within social class groups, 30; studies of, 28-29 Interviews with mothers, 39. See also Caregiver beliefs Language socialization, 7 3 - 7 4 . See also Direct instruction in language and speaking Linguistic complexity: as explanation for developments in compositional meanings, 147-149; in relation to social class, 16-18 Linguistic input, 99, 148 Linguistic reference, origins of, 9 5 - 9 9 Mean length of utterance, 7, 9,16, 44-45 Naming sequences, 77-105, 127-128, 152 Naturalistic observation, 13-15, 3 0 - 3 1 , 3 7 - 4 0 , 1 5 7 , 1 5 9 . See also Observation Observation: effects of, on subjects' behavior, 37, 130-131, 160 Personal dimensions. See Scientistsubject relationship Play: mothers' styles of play, 129-130; rhyming, singing, and playing verbal games, 114-118; speaking appropriately to dolls, 105-114 Portraits of the children and their families, 5, 4 1 - 4 2 , 51-52, 150-151, 155-156 Psycholinguistic abilities: relating to social class, 2 1 - 2 3 Qualitative description. See Portraits of the children and their families Reciprocal discourse. See Conversation, development of Reliability, 47, 49, 168 Research as collaboration. See Scientist-subject relationship

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Research strategy, 3 - 6 , 7, 3 0 - 3 2 , 3 5 - 5 0 , 157, 159-163 Restricted and elaborated codes, 2 3 - 2 5 Rhymes, 114-118 Sampling, 3, 3 5 - 3 7 Scientist-subject relationship: critique of traditional conception of, 31-32; as person-person relationship, 37, 39, 4 2 - 4 3 , 159-163 Semantic/syntactic relations. See Compositional meanings Social class and language development, 4, 7 - 2 6 ; critique of research paradigm, 9 - 1 3 , 26; dialect features, 18-21, 157; early studies, 7 - 1 1 ; lack of evidence concerning young children, 1 5 - 2 5 ; lack of observational studies, 13-15; linguistic complexity, 16-18; psycholinguistic abilities, 2 1 - 2 3 ; uses of language, 2 3 - 2 5 , 157-158; verbal deprivation, 11-15 Social class bias: concerning class differences, 26; in experimental situations, 11-12, 17-18; concerning family environments of low-income groups, 13,157; in measures of language development, 10-12,17,18, 23; in recording child speech, 10 South Baltimore, 3, 7, 30, 3 3 - 3 5 , 1 3 1 , 150,155,158,159, 161 Syntactic errors, 118-119, 122 Teaching. See Direct instruction in language and speaking; Educational implications of findings Teasing, 7 6 - 7 7 , 104 Transcription, 5; as collaboration, 4 2 - 4 3 , 162-163, 166-167; procedures for, 4 2 - 4 3 , 166-174 Unintelligible utterances, 4 4 - 4 5 Uses of language: relating to social class, 2 3 - 2 5 , 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 ; restricted and elaborated codes, 2 3 - 2 5 Verbal deprivation, 12-15, 157 Video recording, 3 7 - 3 8 , 166. See also Observation; Transcription What-questions, 74, 84, 8 8 - 9 9

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