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Unraveling the Dyad: Using Recurrence Analysis to Explore Patterns of Syntactic Coordination Between Children and Caregivers in Conversation
Author(s) -
Dale Rick,
Spivey Michael J.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2006.00372.x
Subject(s) - dyad , conversation , syntax , psychology , linguistics , syntactic structure , conversation analysis , language acquisition , class (philosophy) , developmental psychology , communication , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy , mathematics education
Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word‐class n ‐gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade‐offs in leading or following this coordination reflect individual differences between children at varying levels of development. Further analyses characterize the syntactic patterns that are coordinated, and results are consistent with recent language acquisition research on syntax acquisition. Overall, recurrence analysis reveals that there is a process of child‐caregiver coordination taking place in ongoing conversation at the level of syntactic description.