ENCODING: A CHILD'S USE OF LANGUAGE

"You're lying," "I don't think you are telling the truth," "Fibber," "I don't believe you," "You liar"—these are alternate ways of formulating a single message, and there are many others. We use "Fibber" in one context, "You're lying" in another, and "I don't believe you" in a third, and we seem to make these distinctions without effort. Occasionally we wonder how to broach a delicate subject, but most of the time we speak without deliberation. Yet encoding a message is a complex process, however straightforward the message may be. Samovar and Porter (1988) define encodingas "an internal activity in which verbal and nonverbal behaviors are selected and arranged according to the rules of grammar and syntax appli­cable to the language being used to create a message" (p. 17). In short, when we encode a message, we must have some awareness of the receiver if we want to be understood. The other half of the process is decoding—that is, "the [receiver's] internal processing of a message and the attribution of meaning to the source's behaviors that represent the source's internal state of being" (p. 18).

A look at how children use language gives us a better understanding of what takes place in the encoding process. Children astonish adults with their verbal facility. The three-year-old can formulate sentences, repeat all sorts of long words and colloquial expressions, and use several tenses correctly. Some three-year-olds have a vocabulary of nearly 1,000 words. The five-year-old speaks in correct, finished sentences and even uses complex sentences with hypothetical and con­ditional clauses. At this age the structure and form of language are essentially complete. But what about the encoding abilities of the child?

Egocentric Speech

To study the functions of language in children, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1962) made exhaustive observations and analyses of the way children speak both when they are alone and when they are in the company of other children. He also devised a series of experiments to determine how objective children try to be in communicating information.

A typical Piaget experiment follows this pattern. A child is shown a diagram of a water tap—sometimes Piaget uses a diagram of a bicycle—and given a precise explanation of how it works. Once it has been established that the child under-stands the experimenter's explanation, he or she is asked to repeat it (with the aid of the diagram) to another child. In another variant of this procedure, the child is told a simple story and asked to repeat it to a second child. How do children perform these communication tasks? According to Piaget, not very well. He found that though a child fully understood an explanation or story, he or she was not necessarily successful in communicating it to another child.

Why should this be? It is not that the child lacks the necessary vocabulary. Nor is he or she by any means inarticulate. Piaget's work led him to the conclusion that in the child under age seven or eight, language has two distinct functions and that two kinds of speech exist: egocentric and socialized speech.

As Piaget describes patterns of egocentric speechin the child, he gives us a perfect example of a poor encoder, someone whose speech does not adapt information to the receiver.

Although he talks almost incessantly to his neighbours, he rarely places himself at their point of view. He speaks to them for the most part as if he were thinking aloud. He speaks, therefore, in a language which …above all is always making assertions, even in argument, instead of justifying them …The child hardly ever even asks himself whether he has been understood. For him, that goes without saying, for he does not think about others when he talks.

Piaget believes that until a child is seven or eight, egocentric language con­stitutes almost half of his or her spontaneous speech, and his book, The Language and Thought of the Child, is full of amusing "conversations" between children in which virtually no communication takes place:

L: "Thunder rolls."

P.: "No, it doesn't roll."

L.: "It's water."

P.: "No, it doesn't roll."

L.: "What is thunder?"

P.: "Thunder is . . ." (He doesn't go on.)

In contrast to egocentric speech, socialized speechinvolves adapting information to the receive and in some sense adopting his or her point of view; it involves social rather than nonsocial encoding. Piaget goes beyond his findings about language to argue that the adult "thinks socially, even when he is alone, and …the child under 7 thinks egocentrically, even in the society of others" (1962).

One team of researchers went on to a further examination of this discrepancy between the communication skills of children and adults. Their strategy was to create a communication problem in the form of a game called "Stack the Blocks. Pairs of children, separated by an opaque screen so that they could not see each other, were given sets of blocks with designs that had low codability—that is, they were difficult to describe. Describing the design of the block so that the listener could identify it and stack his or her blocks in the same order was the communication problem.

The children's descriptions showed little social encoding. For example, one block was described by different children as "somebody running," "eagle," "throw­ing sticks," "strip-stripe," and "wire." In the role of speaker, some kindergarteners and first-graders made comments such as "It goes like this" using one finger to trace the design in the air—which of course the listener could not see because he or she was behind a screen (Krauss, in Walcher, 1971). In general, children tended to use private rather than socially shared images; as a result their messages were often idiosyncratic.

Variations of the Stack the Blocks experiment have been conducted with children of all grade levels as well as with adults. Although nursery school children seem totally unable to complete this communication task, effectiveness in com­munication clearly increases with age (as measured by grade level).

According to Piaget's view, then, the speech of children, even at age seven, is of necessity egocentric. Thus they are unable to encode messages effectively for the benefit of others. Their competence in communicating is linked with physical and intellectual development.

Sociocentric Speech

In recent years, most theorists and researchers have come to look upon commu­nication as developing through interaction—that is, as a social phenomenon. Elliott (1984) argues, based on a broad summary of research, that the child is not egocentric but rather sociocentric—that is, centered on social interaction—from birth. The development of competence in communication is seen as a three-part process: the initial interaction between infant and mother is described as primordial sharing; this leads to proto-conrersation, which ultimately leads to conversation.

Primordial sharingrefers to the mothers exchanges with the infant— through grimaces, glances, vocalizations, and so on—and, soon after, the infant's responses. This is a "you and me" stage of communication: meaning and context are not differentiated; "you" and "me" are, in effect, both the context and the meaning. Exchanges between mother and infant convex- mutual attention and recognition. Infant and mother appear to engage in a coordinated interaction: mutual attention, responsiveness, turn-taking, and synchrony of signals. If either mother or infant is unresponsive, there is no interaction, no context, no meaning.

Once mother and infant direct attention to some object outside their pair, proto-conversationsbegin. Infants as young as four weeks attend to objects in their environment. In the next few months, the mutual regard of other objects is supplemented by other actions—for example, alternate gazes to object and other, infant babbling, and development of interpretable gestures such as pointing. These proto-conversations can be characterized by ''you, me, and it." The extension to objects permits a range of meanings and so, for the first time, meaning may be ambiguous (a child points and the mother interprets the possible object, the reasons for pointing, and so on). By the age of three or four, the child's proto-conversation has become pretty successful for taking communicative action. Proto-conversation is limited, however, by what can be pointed to or indicated.

Conversation,the third phase, begins when the context within which interactive meanings are generated includes references to entities and situations that are not present; these may be imaginary or even unknown. Although meaning is distinguished from context in proto-conversation, the context in conversation is far larger; now meaning and action may be generated within the interaction itself.

The child's development of conversational abilities has been traced by Haslett, who looks at four aspects of the child's "increasing understanding of how conversational exchanges take place" (1984, p. 107). Four areas of competence are developed out of social interaction. First comes the child's understanding of the value of communication. According to Haslett, human beings seem to have an innate grasp of interpersonal interaction; this sense that through communication we establish relationships may correspond to Elliott's notion of being sociocentric. Thus, children are motivated, perhaps innately, to communicate with others. The infant explores communication by interacting with an adult caretaker—in Western cultures, usually the mother.

The second stage is reached when the infant's behavior becomes less idiosyncratic and more conventional—that is, it takes on more of the characteristics of generally agreed-upon communication signals. Now infants communicate inten­tionally: they check adults for feedback, alter their signals when adult behavior changes, and shorten and ritualize signals so that they become more conventional. The effort, then, is to enter a world of shared meanings. Over time the child progresses from intent-to-act (usually on physical objects) to intent-to-convey (the expression of content). During the course of interaction, the infant's use of words becomes more accountable through the mother's responses—that is, the mother and child negotiate meaning.

The third stage of the child's development concerns understanding the nature of conversation.While many of the infant's first communications were mono­logues, dialogues (conversations) represent a joint negotiation of meaning be­tween two parties. Before understanding the nature of conversation, the child must recognize four fundamentals:

1. Conversations have signals that indicate beginnings and endings.

2. Conversations require both speaking and listening.

3. Roles reverse during conversation; you listen sometimes and speak at other times.

4. Participants reverse roles by taking turns, (p. 113)

Americans often expressed surprise in my presence at the fact that French people, "who claim to be very big on manners," are themselves so "rude": "they interrupt you all the time in conversation," "they finish your sentences for you," "they ask you questions and never listen to the answer," and so on. French people, on the other hand, often complain that American conversa­tions are "boring," that Americans respond to the slightest question with a "lecture," that they "go all the way back to Adam and Eve," and that they "know nothing about the art of conversation." (Carroll, 1988, p. 23)

The word "conversation" is the same in English and French, but as Raymonde Carroll explains, "It is far from signifying the same thing in the two cultures." Words per se cannot be said to "contain" meaning. As we will see, even for people who share a common language, words often generate very different associations.

As we examine verbal messages in this chapter, we will take up four major concerns. The first is the relationship between words and meaning. Thus we will be talking about the symbolic nature of language, the descriptive and associative aspects of words (denotation and connotation), as well as private and shared meanings.

A second section takes up the complex process of formulating verbal messages and how we all learn to do this. As we examine the next issue, how language and thought are related, you will learn about a highly influential theory on the subject, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and then look at several ways in which language use— abstraction, for example—affects your thinking.

In the concluding section, you will also learn about the influence of language usage on feelings and behavior. You will be looking at sexist language, gender differences in the use of language, and the linguistic forms considered more powerful or effective.

Let's turn first to a consideration of the nature of language.

MEANING

We saw in Chapter 1 that the communication process involves sending messages from one person's nervous system to another's with the intention of creating a meaning similar to the one in the sender's mind. The verbal message does this through words, the basic elements of language, and words, of course, are verbal symbols.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 739