Developmental Factors in Conversational Behavior

Abstract

Listener responses (LRs) have been found to appear far less frequently among children than among adolescents and adults, and the initial explorations of this finding, both empirical and theoretical, are reported in this paper. Observations of children in first, third, and fifth grade in school (but not in school-like situations) showed LRs to be almost absent except under the strongest social “pull,” and to be very variable from child to child. Video taped sessions in the laboratory showed older children to make small movements which may not be communicative, to make the more definite ones a bit late compared with adults, and confirmed the wide individual variability. Discussion focuses on two functions of LRs, the linguistic and the social.

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