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Integration of communicative partner's visual perspective in patterns of referential requests*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2008

SEVDA BAHTIYAR  and
AYLIN C. KÜNTAY
SEVDA BAHTIYAR
Affiliation:
Koç University, Turkey
AYLIN C. KÜNTAY*
Affiliation:
Koç University, Turkey
*
Address for correspondence: Aylin Küntay, Koç University – Psychology, Rumeli Feneri Yolu Sariyer, Istanbul 34450, Turkey. Email: akuntay@ku.edu.tr
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Abstract

How do Turkish children differ from adults in sensitivity to the commonality of their partner's perspective with their own in producing referential language? Fifteen five- to six-year-olds, 15 nine- to ten-year-olds and 15 adults were asked to tell a confederate to pick up an object across three conditions: the common ground condition, in which two similar objects with one contrastive feature were visible to both the participants and the confederate; the privileged ground condition, in which one of the two similar objects was available only to the participant; and the baseline condition, in which there were no competing objects. Age-related increases were found from preschool ages into adulthood in the production of (a) discriminating adjectives in the common ground trials, and (b) requestive speech acts with verbal constructions, rather than noun-only labels. A follow-up study with preschoolers (N=15) prompted for requestive speech acts, leading to an increase in discriminating adjectives.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , June 2009 , pp. 529 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This work has been supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences, in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program to Aylin C. Küntay (AK-TÜBA-GEBİP/2001-2-13). Sevda Bahtiyar is currently a graduate student at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Some of this work was first published in Chan, Jacob & Kapia (2008). Portions of this research have been presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (2007), the Boston University Conference on Language Development (2007) and the 15th Australasian Human Development Biennial Meeting (2007) in Sydney. We thank our audiences for their comments. We also thank Gülce Alev and Nihan Alev for their help in data collection. We thank Hande Sungur and Özlem Özdamar in helping us carry out Study 2, and Bengi Keskin for helping with the inter-reliability coding. Thanks to the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript and the Associate Editor and Editor of JCL in leading to a much improved presentation of our work. We owe this work to the cooperation of many children in several preschools in Istanbul, and their parents and teachers.

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