Speech acts by mother and child: Determining their nature and form

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to determine to what extent the psychological, social, and cultural features of the communication situation affect the production of speech acts during an interaction between an adult and a child. Variations in the nature of the speech acts produced (assertive, directive, expressive, and commissive) and in their linguistic form (imperative, declarative, interrogative, and exclamative) were studied in relation to three variables describing the communication situation: (a) a psychological variable, the mother’s child-raising style (coercive or inductive) which was assessed using a questionnaire on parental control behavior (MCCP, Tessier, Pilon, & Fecteau, 1985); (b) a social variable, the social role of the speaker (mother or child); and (c) a cultural variable, the origin of the dialogue partners (French or Canadian). For each cultural sample, 15-minute dialogues were recorded while 10 pairs of mothers in interaction with their 5 and 6 year old daughters performed a task involving drawing on a computer. The results suggest that for children between the ages of 5 and 6, the production of speech acts is mainly controlled by the social characteristics of the communication situation rather than by its psychological and cultural features. Mothers appear instead to be sensitive to all three kinds of factors. Moreover, the four types of speech acts were found to differ in their frequency of occurrence, linguistic form, and reaction to the psychological, social, and cultural characteristics of the communication situation. Finally, this study suggests that the effects of these characteristics on speech act production are not uniform, but vary according to the index under consideration.