Language acquisition: hesitations in the question/answer dialogic pair.

Lourenço Chacon,Cristyane De Camargo Sampaio Villega

doi:10.1590/2317-1782/20152014048

Lourenço Chacon, Cristyane De Camargo Sampaio Villega

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/2317-1782/20152014048

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Abstract

(1) To verify the existence (or not) of hesitation marks in the beginning of utterances in children's discourse; and (2) to determine to what extent the presence/absence of these marks could be explained by retrievable facts in the production conditions of their discourses. Interview situations with four children aged 5-6 years attending Kindergarten level II in a public preschool at the time of the data collection were analyzed. The interviews were recorded on audio and video, inside a soundproof booth, with high fidelity equipment. Afterwards, the recordings were transcribed by six transcribers that were specially trained for this task. Transcription rules that prioritized the analyses of hesitations were used. For the analysis of retrievable facts in the production conditions of children's discourse, the dialogic pair question-answer was adopted. A correlation between presence/absence of hesitation in the beginning of utterances in children and type of question (open/closed) made by the collocutor was observed. When the question was closed ended, the utterances were preferably initiated without hesitation marks, and when the question was open ended, the utterances were preferably initiated with hesitation marks. The presence/absence of hesitation marks in the beginning of utterances in children was found to be dependent on the production conditions of their discourses.

Highlights

Several analyses for hesitations can be observed in studies of language acquisition
Taking into consideration the amount of utterances analyzed in this study, preferably they were initiated without hesitation marks, the presence/absence of hesitation was directly associated with the type of question asked by the collocutor to the children
The results point to the need of not analyzing separately the utterances because the presence/absence of hesitation marks in their beginnings proved heavily dependent on the type of dialogic pair involved in the production of the discourse

Summary

Introduction

Several analyses for hesitations can be observed in studies of language acquisition. In a first set of studies, the focus lies on how the aspects of fluency and/or disfluency of speech indicate what is considered as normal or pathological in language acquisition. In this research, both the disfluencies considered common to all speakers and the ones seen as more typical of individuals diagnosed with stuttering were analyzed[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. In a second set of studies, the analysis of hesitations is in the context of relationships between subjectivity and stuttering. In this research, the negative view of speech disfluencies is criticized because, according to their authors, these disfluencies are inherent to language acquisition and their appearance lies not on the person itself but rather on the relationship between man and culture/society and on the “well-speaking ideology”(8.9)

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