title: Talk about talk with young children: pragmatic socialization in two communities in Norway and the US.
abstract: Recent studies have suggested that cultures vary in subtle ways in the talk about talk that children hear and learn to produce. Twenty-two three-year-old children and their families in respectively Oslo, Norway and Cambridge, Massachusetts were observed during mealtime with the aim of identifying talk-focused talk. The analysis distinguished talk about (a) language per se, (b) discourse management, and (c) former conversations and use of reported speech. No category of talk-focused talk appeared exclusively in either community, and the frequency of such talk was similar across these. The Oslo families talked more often about language per se and their talk-focused conversations typically had a question-answer form. Talk about talk appeared more often within narratives in Oslo and within explanations in Cambridge. A second analysis compared talk-focused talk at home with such talk at school, suggesting that talk about language per se appeared more often at school across the two communities.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Educational Research, University of Oslo, Blindern, Norway.
authors.forename: Vibeke Grøver
authors.initials: VG
authors.lastname: Aukrust
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008404:Massachusetts; D009664:Norway; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012574:Schools; D012951:Socialization; D014705:Verbal Behavior