Syntactic resonance in child-caretaker interaction and children’s peer talk

Language acquisition takes place as children are engaged in social interaction (Kuhl, 2004; Langacker, 2009) and through different perspectives including Language Socialization (Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003), longitudinal Conversation Analysis (Hauser, 2013), and Usage-Based Linguistics (Ellis et al, 2015; Clark, 2015). Although each draws on slightly different disciplinary backgrounds (language socialization (Anthropology), longitudinal Conversation Analysis (Applied Linguistics), and Usage-Based Linguistics (Linguistics and Psychology)), they share one thrust that language learning takes place in social interaction as the learners participate in culturally constituted joint activities.

Examination of children’s interaction data is argued to reveal that among other things, a remarkable degree of resonance across the child utterance and parent utterance. Relating the degree of syntactic resonance in each child’s interaction and their language proficiency would make not only a theoretically intriguing question, but also have potentially useful pedagogical implications, such in potential guidance as to how to use language to facilitate language learning, e.g., types of repetition. Indeed, previous research reports that children with autism demonstrate atypicalities in sequences identified as dialogic resonance in their interaction with adults (Hobson, Hobson, Garcia-Pérez, & Du Bois, 2012). This emerging research suggests that resonance/syntactic repetition may be a previously overlooked index of a child’s language development.

One component of resonance is claimed to be abstract structural priming. This is a type of discourse alignment prominent in experimental psychology. It is the repetition of an interlocutor’s syntax. Demonstrations of structural priming in the laboratory have led to claims of its importance to natural language learning, and some have interpreted it as evidence for formal linguistic theories of autonomous syntax. In this project, we aim to explore what was the extent of abstract structural priming in child language interactions with adults (represented by corpora collected by the researchers and drawn from CHILDES).