CASLPA Handout - April 29, 2011 · Daniela O’Neill University of Waterloo For copyright reasons,...

CASLPA Handout - April 29, 2011

Daniela K. O’Neill - Presentation at CASLPA Conference, Montreal, QB

Preliminary results. Do not quote in any written publication without prior permission of author.

Bells, Whistles and Trendy Design:

The Impact of Modern Toy and Book Features on Parent-Child Talk

Daniela O’Neill

University of Waterloo

For copyright reasons, some slides with images have been omitted and/or

certain Images have been changed or deleted from the handout. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Julianne Scott, Daniela O’Neill & Ashley McKinley


• parent-child play is an important everyday social context where language learning can occur

• little research has investigated how the features of the tools of play (i.e., toys) impact the language children are exposed to during parent-child play




•  modern toys increasingly feature: •  electronic components •  parts with trendy colours and patterns

•  these features may negatively impact parent-child communicative interactions by reducing: •  the amount and quality of parental talk •  the ability to produce joint reference

Experiment 1 – Sounds

Method

• thirty-four 28-month-olds & parent (19 girls; 15 boys & 29 moms; 5 dads)

• half of the dyads played with a driving toy with sound; half without sound (batteries removed)

X driving toy

Method

• dyads could play as long as they wished

• we transcribed all parent-child talk

• focus was parental questions that were coded into one of 3 types

X driving toy




Coding of Parent’s Question Utterances

1. Decontextualized • pretend, absent real reference, general facts & hypothetical talk (e.g., Where you gonna drive?)

2. Present-oriented •  labelling, locating, noticing, describing &

procedural talk (e.g.,What’s that button do?)

3. Other •  clarifications, confirmations, praise,

exclamations, unrelated talk & finishing talk

Results: Parental Questions by Toy Type

•  trend for more questions when toy silent

Results: Parental Questions by Sex of Child

•  significantly more questions to girls when toy silent




sExamples of Present-Oriented Questions

Labels: "Are those numbers or letters?”

Procedural: "Can you push the buttons?"

Locate: "Where's the number two?"

EExamples of Decontextualized Questions

Pretense: "Who are you calling?"; "Where should we drive?"; "You wanna drive to the park?"

Hypothetical: "What do you think will happen if you press that one?" (referring to the button of a police car)

Absent real reference: "Remember you got to drive the fire truck this weekend?"; "Did we see an ambulance on the way here?"

General knowledge: "Where does the ambulance take people?"; "What do you do on the phone?"; "How do you drive?"

Results: Category Types of Parental Questions

• significantly more present-oriented questions when the toy makes sounds




Results: Category Types of Parental Questions

• when toy silent, significantly greater proportion of decontextualized than present-oriented questions

Conclusions

1. Our results suggest that children hear fewer parental questions when playing with a toy with sounds – this is especially so when parents and their daughters are playing together

2. The quality of parental talk is influenced by a toy’s sounds – a greater proportion of parents’ questions were decontextualized when playing with a silent toy

X

Experiment 2 – Design Features

Stimuli

• We modified two “busy” commercial toys to create a “simple” version

stacking rings busy simple

building blocks busy simple




Method

• 24 23-month-olds (12 girls;12 boys) & moms • play with one “busy” and one “simple” toy • dyads could play as long as they wished



Method

• videotaped - we transcribed all parent-child talk • focus was on mom’s utterances referencing parts of the toy (i.e., the rings of the stacking toy)



Coding of Referential Utterances

1. General • “Let’s try another one.”

2. Property Specific • “Can you put the yellow one back on for mummy?

• Ambiguous or unambiguous • "That's a big vs. pink flower" • Aspect referenced (colour, pattern, size, other)




Results: References to Toy Part by Toy Type

•  significantly more property-specific references when toy design is simple

Results: Unambiguous References

•  significantly more unambiguous references when toy design is simple

88.6

69.8

30.2

11.4

Results: Types of Unambiguous/Ambiguous

“That’s an orange flower”

“Get the big one”




Examples of Unambiguous References

Colour 93.2% That’s an orange flower.

Size 5.1% That’s the smallest one.

Other 1.7% Can you get the last one off?

Size 46.2% Get the really big one.

Colour 30.8% Orange one on top.

Other 15.4% Can you pull off the top one?

Pattern 7.7% This one is all spotty.

Simple (88.6% of all refs are unambig.)

Busy (30.2% of all refs are unambig.)

Conclusions

1. Busy toys with trendy colours and patterns decrease parental references to specific properties of a toy’s parts leading to fewer unambiguous references – this may make joint reference and a joint focus of attention more difficult to achieve.



Joint Focus in Word Learning

•  Moments when a child and an adult are focused on the same thing (visually or via other modalities)

•  For a child to learn new words, he or she needs to attend to the speaker and to what the speaker is attending to

•  Joint focus may be critical for learning early words (e.g., Bruner, 1983; Akhtar & Gernsbacher, 2007; Tomasello, 1995)




Angela Nyhout and Daniela O’Neill


Experiment 3 – Picture Book Genre

Stimuli: Narrative & Non-Narrative Adaptation

Nar

rativ

e D

idac

tic

Narrative & Didactic Adaptation




Nar

rativ

e D

idac

tic

Narrative & Didactic Adaptation

Method

• 24 21-month-olds (12 girls;12 boys) & moms • share one “narrative” and one “didactic” book • we transcribed all parent-child talk

Dyad 1 Dyad 2

Mom’s narration: He’s sleepy this man. His eyes are closed in all the pictures. He’s walking up to this door and all the animals are following him. Do you think they’re gonna go to his bed with him? Do you think they’re gonna cuddle with him? He’ll be surprised in the morning, huh?

Mom’s narration Here they all are. Look at them all. Can you show me the elephant? (Child points to elephant) Where’s the giraffe? (Child points to giraffe) Which one’s the hyena? He looks like a dog. (Child points to hyena).




Mom’s narration: He’s sleepy this man. His eyes are closed in all the pictures. He’s walking up to this door and all the animals are following him. Do you think they’re gonna go to his bed with him? Do you think they’re gonna cuddle with him? He’ll be surprised in the morning, huh?

Mom’s narration Here they all are. Look at them all. Can you show me the elephant? (Child points to elephant) Where’s the giraffe? (Child points to giraffe) Which one’s the hyena? He looks like a dog. (Child points to hyena).

Mean Length of Utterances

Mental state terms




Tense Variety

Tense Frequency

Perspective in narrative Fundamental function of narrative is “not to report a chronological sequence of events, but to signal a perspective on events…” (Gee, 1991, p. 20)

Landscape of Consciousness

•  the depiction of reality not through an omniscient eye that views a timeless reality, but through the filter of the consciousness of the protagonists in the story…

•  beholding the world not univocally but simultaneously through a set of prisms each of which catches some part of it

(Bruner, 1986, p. 25-26)




Temporal viewpoints

All Stories take place in time….Although we can only perceive a story from a unique moment in time, namely the present, once that story is in the imagination, we can understand different temporal moments of the story as if they belong to different “temporal spaces…

The tense of the verb is an instrument for indicating temporal viewpoint and temporal focus on a story partitioned over temporal spaces….

[the everyday mind] is extremely adept at coordinating different mental spaces distinguished by temporal viewpoint and focus”

(Turner, 1996, p.118-122)

Further Information Daniela O’Neill

[email protected]

www.childstudies.uwaterloo.ca (for all pdfs)

http://twitter.com/daniela_oneill

This work was made possible by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and

the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

We thank all the parents and children of the Kitchener-Waterloo who generously volunteered their time to take part in our studies.

CASLPA Handout - April 29, 2011 · Daniela O’Neill University of Waterloo For copyright reasons,...

Documents

Transcript of CASLPA Handout - April 29, 2011 · Daniela O’Neill University of Waterloo For copyright reasons,...