We now turn to the available developmental research concerning children's acquisition of spatial and temporal-aspectual devices. With respect to spatial devices (Section 6.1), a large number of studies have invoked general (cognitive, perceptual) factors to account for recurrent developmental sequences, but recent results show that language-specific factors also affect the rate and course of development. Less is known about pragmatic determinants of acquisition in this domain, although some evidence shows that young children have difficulties anchoring spatial information and that typological factors affect how they select and organise it in discourse. With respect to temporal-aspectual devices (Section 6.2), much of the available research has focused on the cognitive determinants of the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology and connectives. A large body of studies have supported the hypothesis that children's uses of verbal inflections are determined by universal concepts of situations and that they initially mark aspect, but not tense. This claim, however, has not remained uncontroversial in the light of two types of evidence: cross-linguistic evidence suggesting that it should be strongly modified and evidence for discourse pragmatic determinants that are not taken into account by the hypothesis. It is concluded (Section 6.3) that more cross-linguistic research is necessary to determine the relative impact of semantic, discourse functional, and language-specific factors on acquisition in these domains.

Motion and location

Studies stemming from different traditions and disciplines are relevant to address current controversial questions concerning the relation among different (perceptual, motor, cognitive, linguistic) components of spatial cognition during ontogenesis.

As recurrently noted throughout the review of the developmental literature presented in the preceding chapters, some pervasive methodological problems plague the study of language and/or discourse development, resulting in divergent conclusions and claims concerning the timing, course, and determinants of acquisition. The first part of this chapter (Section 7.1) summarises these methodological problems, showing that studies differ along a considerable number of variables, making it difficult to compare and to generalise results. Taking this methodological discussion as a starting point, the remainder of this chapter (Section 7.2) then presents the rationale, methodology, and database of the cross-linguistic study to be presented in subsequent chapters, which was designed to address some of the unanswered questions previously raised.

Control of relevant variables

As noted previously (Chapters 4 to 6), the available developmental research on discourse development and/or on the acquisition of particular linguistic devices in several domains of child language presents some divergent results and conclusions concerning the factors that might determine acquisition. I argued that some of these divergences result from the different theoretical foci adopted by researchers across various disciplines and traditions. In addition, I briefly indicated some problems resulting from a pervasive methodological heterogeneity across studies, to which I now turn in more detail. I consider below different methods of data collection (Section 7.1.1), as well as a number of variables that require adequate control: discourse situations (Section 7.1.2), tasks and adult interventions (Section 7.1.3), materials and their mode of presentation (Section 7.1.4), and background knowledge conditions (Section 7.1.5).

The present chapter provides theoretical background by spelling out some of the major current debates that oppose different approaches in developmental psycholinguistics. I first summarise a number of main controversial issues that are currently debated in the study of language acquisition (Section 2.1). I then focus on some fundamental properties of language within functional approaches to language (Section 2.2), including multifunctionality and context-dependence, as well as the existence of two levels of linguistic organisation, the sentence and discourse. Finally, I examine general universal principles of discourse organisation that underlie how speakers regulate the flow of personal, spatial, and temporal information across utterances in cohesive discourse (Section 2.3). Subsequent chapters show how these principles constitute fundamental aspects of our linguistic competence that must be mastered by children and that affect their acquisition of linguistic devices across domains.

Some main theoretical issues in theories of language acquisition

I briefly summarise here five major recurrent issues that have been controversial among different approaches to language acquisition: claims about the innateness of language vs. its gradual construction by the child (Section 2.1.1); the relative importance attributed to form and structure vs. function and context-dependence as criterial properties of language (Section 2.1.2); the related focus on competence vs. performance (Section 2.1.3); the relative continuity vs. discontinuity in the course of acquisition (2.1.4); different views of the relation between language and cognition during development, varying in terms of whether and how language may have a structuring role on thought (Section 2.1.5).

The aim of this book is to explore two questions in the study of first language acquisition: the role of structural and functional determinants during acquisition, and the extent to which the developmental process is invariant vs. variable across languages. In order to address these questions, I examine within a functional and cross-linguistic perspective the acquisition of a variety of linguistic devices relevant to three domains of child language: the denotation of entities, the expression of motion and location, and the marking of temporal-aspectual distinctions. In relation to the first question, my aim is to determine the relative impact of two types of factors during language acquisition: syntactic and semantic factors that operate at the sentence level; and discourse pragmatic factors that operate beyond the sentence, particularly those that regulate the flow of information across utterances as a function of presupposition and focus in discourse. Furthermore, the book is framed within a comparative perspective, in which evidence from different languages is repeatedly brought to bear on the second question, in light of various claims concerning universal vs. language-specific determinants of acquisition.

After an introduction presenting the general aims of the book, subsequent chapters are divided into two parts. The first part provides a general theoretical background and overview of the relevant developmental literature.

As previously shown (Chapter 6), the available research concerning children's uses of temporal-aspectual markings presents several claims concerning acquisition in this domain. Some studies argue that universal properties of verb semantics and/or concepts of situations determine how these devices are used, further putting forth the hypothesis that young children mark situation aspect rather than tense. In contrast, other studies show the impact of language-specific and/or of discourse functional determinants on acquisition, which are not taken into account by this hypothesis. In the analyses of the corpora below, I first describe the general distributions of all temporal-aspectual devices in the narratives (Section 10.1). I then examine whether the semantic properties of predicates affect the uses of verbal morphology, with particular attention to the presumed universal impact of boundedness on the uses of past and/or perfective markings (Section 10.2). Finally, I turn to discourse determinants of these uses (Section 10.3), examining different types of temporal anchoring in the narratives, as well as temporal-aspectual shifts and uses of connectives. In conclusion (Section 10.4), the presented evidence partly supports the defective tense hypothesis, suggesting that situation aspect affects children's uses to some extent. However, it also shows the need to modify this hypothesis for two reasons: the gradual loosening of this association partly results from the requirements of discourse organisation and the language to be acquired has an impact on the strength of this original association, as well as on the subsequent loosening process.

This chapter examines a variety of linguistic devices expressing motion and location in the narratives. As we saw (Chapter 6), previous developmental studies have shown the role of general cognitive factors in children's organisation of spatial information in discourse, as well as the impact of language-specific factors from the youngest ages onwards. Recall (Chapter 3) that languages belong to typologically distinct families with respect to the encoding of motion events (Talmy 1983, 1985, 2000). Satellite-framed languages (English, German, and Chinese in the present sample) represent the manner of motion in the main verb root, while compactly expressing other types of information by means of satellites (such as particles, prepositions, complex verb constructions). In contrast, verb-framed languages (French in the present sample) encode path information in the verb root, while manner, if it is at all expressed, is encoded in the periphery of the clause. The analyses below first examine the situation types denoted by various predicates across languages (Section 9.1). I then examine the ways in which spatial grounds are mentioned in discourse, focusing first on the overall explicitness of these mentions (Section 9.2), then on the first mention of these entities in discourse (Section 9.3) and on subsequent reference-maintenance (Section 9.4). It is concluded (Section 9.5) that sentence factors (grammaticalisation or lexicalisation) and discourse factors (the status of spatial information) both affect children's uses of spatial devices, resulting in invariant, as well as language-specific developmental patterns.

I have researched conversation since I graduated from the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. For the first seven years I studied everyday telephone conversations, and I then became interested in what I referred to as “interviewing techniques” in doctor–patient interaction. What did the textbooks say about how medical doctors should interact with their patients, and how did these interviewing techniques work out in real interactions? The advice these books provided was mainly based on psychological and socio-psychological theories of human interaction, and the real interactions often were not as successful as the textbooks predicted.

Being interested in interaction, and especially in the relationship between “how it should be done” and “how it is actually done,” I chose the standardized survey interview as a uniquely interesting research object. A considerable amount of what we know about the social world comes from survey research that finds its way into books, articles, and the mass media. This survey research occasionally provides some general information about the questionnaire, the sample interviewed, and the statistical analysis, but it does not explain what actually happens in the interviews. In fact, the reader and/or user of survey research results is made to believe that interviewers read the questions exactly as they are scripted and respondents behave exactly as they are supposed to behave.

In order to learn what is going on in this part of the survey research procedure, we need to examine questionnaires and analyze recorded interviews.

Introduction

When an interviewer and a respondent are engaged in a survey interview, they are performing communicative actions. The interviewer asks a question, and sometimes presents the answering categories, by reading the questionnaire. The question is answered by the respondent, and the interviewer acknowledges that the answer has been received. This results in the following action sequence:

In survey methodology the question-answer-acceptance sequence is considered the “prototype sequence” (Schaeffer and Maynard 1996) or “norm sequence” (Van der Zouwen and Dijkstra 1995) in standardized survey interviews. Interviewer and respondent are considered as behaving “adequately” if they act according to the script; that is, if the interviewer reads the question (and response options) exactly as written, and the respondent provides an answer that matches the question or selects one of the presented answer categories.

Behavior coding studies of recorded survey interviews show that all participants often behave “inadequately.” Interviewers rephrase questions, change the order of the questions, probe in a leading manner, fail to read the answer options, or read only parts of the questions (Smit 1995). Respondents, for their part, provide answers that do not match the options, say more than just “yes” or “no” in response to a yes–no question (Molenaar and Smit 1996), and behave in other “inadequate” ways.

When both interviewers and respondents behave inadequately from a stimulus-response perspective, they do not act in the way that the questionnaire designer expects.

Introduction

Respondents are social and emotional beings who cannot be forced to provide the information that is sought by the interviewer. The interviewer therefore needs to establish a relationship with the respondent that may improve the his or her willingness and ability to co-operate. Fowler and Mangione (1990) state, “We want a warm, professional relationship, one in which the interviewer is respected and trusted, but nonetheless the kind of professional who is accepting and nonjudgmental” (64).

In the literature on survey methodology, two types of interview styles tend to be distinguished: the task-oriented, or formal style, and the person-oriented, or socio-emotional style (Hyman 1954, Dijkstra 1983 and 1987). However, the literature does not make clear how a personoriented interview style is achieved. The person-oriented interviewer is generally described in evaluative terms, such as “personal,” “warm,” and “friendly,” or as “the sort of person to whom one might tell personal information that would be more difficult to tell to a stranger” (Fowler and Mangione 1990: 64). Such qualifications do not clarify what an interviewer is supposed to do in order to be perceived as personal or warm.

The literature on the effects of these two types of interview styles occasionally includes examples of interviewers' utterances that are supposed to reflect a personal style.

Introduction

Field-coded questions are open questions from the respondents' point of view. While closed questions consist of both the question and the response options, field-coded questions consist of the question only. From the perspective of the interviewers, however, a field-coded question consists of more than just the question. The interviewers have a set of response options in front of them, and they must record the respondents' answers by checking the corresponding box. As Fowler and Mangione point out (1990: 88), field-coded questions require interviewers to be coders, because they have to classify the respondents' answers in order to be able to check one of the answer boxes.

Because the respondents are not informed of the responses they can choose from, their answers are often unformatted, that is, they do not match the response categories. Unformatted answers occur not only in response to field-coded questions. We also find them when the response options have been read to respondents. When answers are not fit for recording, in whatever context they are produced, interviewers are faced with the task of probing for a recordable answer. How do they do this? What conversational devices do interviewers employ to probe for a recordable answer?

Textbooks on survey interviewing do not offer much information on how to probe for answers, except to say that the interviewer should not probe in a directive manner.