Open AccessExploring "Associative Talk": When German Mothers Instruct Their Two Year Olds about Spatial Tasks
Author(s) -
Katharina J. Rohlfing
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
dialogue and discourse
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2152-9620
DOI - 10.5087/dad.2011.201
Subject(s) - german , task (project management) , associative property , adaptation (eye) , word (group theory) , computer science , table (database) , spatial relation , relation (database) , linguistics , process (computing) , discourse analysis , situated , psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , mathematics , engineering , philosophy , systems engineering , database , neuroscience , pure mathematics , data mining , operating system
In this study, maternal input was analyzed during a task, in which German mothers instructed their two-year-old children to put two objects together in a particular way. In the setting, the spatial relation (ON and UNDER) and the canonicality of these relations (canonical such as ‘a pot on a table’ and noncanonical like ‘a train on a tunnel’) were varied. Two kinds of discourse strategies are proposed that characterize mothers’ input in this task: bring-in and follow-in. For the analysis, an automatic procedure was developed, in which the amount of words spent on a strategy was related to the overall word amount. The data suggest that the canonicality of the task can change the discourse: Bring-in strategies dominated the discourse in tasks with canonical spatial relations while in more difficult tasks with non-canonical relations, German-speaking mothers used follow-ins significantly more often than in the canonical tasks. Together, the results of this study shed light on the process of an on-line adaptation of the mother to her child and give us insight into how a situated understanding in a task-oriented discourse emerges.