The game interaction discussed in chapter 4 provided the primary data on children's language use. In this chapter the results of the analysis of this data are presented and then placed in the context of other work on child language development. To begin, there is a report of the data on the speechacts produced by mother and child for each of the four age groups together with an analysis of the differences of the number, type of use, success and directness of the speech-acts across the age groups. This is followed by a discussion of the results of the research on indirectness and non-literality. The chapter closes with a discussion of the evidence on conversational cooperation.

Speech-acts analysis

Each utterance addressed to the child or the mother during the game interaction was coded according to the conversational act or function it performed. The coding system itself is presented in chapter 4. Then, for each age group, the mean number of conversational acts of each conversational class and a standard deviation within the age group was computed for both the mothers and the children. The results suggest that despite some within-group variability, the speech-acts produced by the children and their mothers differ across age groups. The relationship between the mothers' and the children's scores was also examined. A nonsignificant relationship was found between the mothers' and the children's acknowledgments (r=0.29), commissives (r=-0.152), expressives (r=-0.009), assertives (r=-0.008), requestives (r=0.01) and responsives (r=0.39).