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7 - Development of Communicative Competence through Private and Inner Speech

from Part II - Language, Communication, Social Cognition, and Awareness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

By
Peter Feigenbaum
Edited by
Adam Winsler ,
Charles Fernyhough  and
Ignacio Montero
Adam Winsler
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
Charles Fernyhough
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Ignacio Montero
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Summary

One of the most challenging psycholinguistic problems children face when they are acquiring a first language is learning how to use it to communicate. Communicating with speech is complex because it is simultaneously a social, linguistic, and psychological activity. Although most research on children's acquisition of language has focused on the lexical, semantic, and syntactic structures, it is the discourse structures of language that are pivotal to communication (Moffett, 1968). Discourse occupies the level of organization of language just above the sentence or clause – the sociolinguistic level where a sentence initiated by one person is met with a responding sentence from another person (Stubbs, 1983). The initiation-response structure of discourse frames and regulates the interpersonal exchange of sentences, as well as the ideas conveyed by them. Conversational activity – the most basic type of discourse – has the capacity to structure communicative interactions because it is conducted according to social conventions, the most obvious of which is the alternation of turns at talking and listening.

Learning to converse involves understanding not only how to produce and comprehend words, phrases, and grammatically well-formed sentences, but also how to initiate and respond to a turn at talk, how to play complementary social roles, how to imagine another person's perspective, and how to formulate and interpret communicative intentions. Initiating and responding to a conversational turn at talk are deceptively complicated activities because they require knowing the more subtle social conventions that prescribe how participants are expected to think, such as the obligation speakers have to stick to the topic – that is, to adapt the information in their utterance so that it both responds to the previous turn and initiates the next one.

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Private Speech, Executive Functioning, and the Development of Verbal Self-Regulation , pp. 105 - 120
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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