Accurate referential communication and its relation with private and social speech in a naturalistic context.
Research into human communication has been grouped under two traditions: referential and sociolinguistic. The study of a communication behavior simultaneously from both paradigms appears to be absent. Basically, this paper analyzes the use of private and social speech, through both a referential task (Word Pairs) and a naturalistic dyadic setting (Lego-set) administered to a sample of 64 children from grades 3 and 5. All children, of 8 and 10 years of age, used speech that was not adapted to the decoder, and thus ineffective for interpersonal communication, in both referential and sociolinguistic communication. Pairs of high-skill referential encoders used significantly more task-relevant social speech, that is, cognitively more complex, than did low-skill dyads in the naturalistic context. High-skill referential encoder dyads showed a trend to produce more inaudible private speech than did low-skill ones during spontaneous communication. Gender did not affect the results.
Girbau
Dolors
D
Department of Basic Psychology, Jaume I University, Spain. girbau@psb.uji.es
Boada
Humbert
H
D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D003142:Communication; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D013030:Spain; D013060:Speech