Selected pragmatic features in Spanish-speaking preschool children

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 18, No. 4, 1989

Selected Pragmatic Features in Spanish-Spealdng Preschool Children

Ilse Lehmann Barrenechea I and John F. Schmitt 2'3

Accepted January 19, 1989

We assessed Spanish-speaking preschool children for the development of seven language functions and three discourse features. Analyses consisted of spontaneous language samples averaging 136 utterances per child, for 18 subjects between 3:0 and 4:5 (years:months). Data for the frequency of occurrence and the percentage of appropriate usage showed that the preschoolers had established communicative competence for the functions and discourse features. Implications include establishing preliminary guidelines for the development of normal pragmatics in Hispanic preschoolers. We also discuss the lO-item taxonomy as a reliable and clinically useful tool with either English-speaking or Spanish-speaking children.

Pragmatics is the area of language that addresses how language is used to express various functions in different contexts and how speakers use language to introduce, maintain, and terminate conversations (Irwin, 1982; Lahey, 1988). As such, pragmatics has been the focus of considerable attention in the last 15 years, with many researchers developing taxonomies for classifying the various language functions and discourse features of English-speaking children (Fey, 1986; McTear, 1985; Owens, 1988). Among the published taxonomies of language functions are those by Bates, Camaioni, and Volterra (1975), Halliday (1975), Dote (1975, 1977), and Prutting and Kirchner (1983). Such

~Clinica de Desarollo, San Jose, Costa Rica. 2University of Alabama. 3Address all correspondence to Dr. John F. Schmitt, University of Alabama, Department of Communicative Disorders, P.O. Box 1903, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-1903.

353

0090-6905/89/0700-0353506.00/0 �9 i989 Plenum Publishing Corporation

354 Barrenechea and Schmitt

taxonomies reflect the growing body of knowledge concerning the development of language functions and discourse features by English- speaking children. In addition to developing classification systems for the functions of language, investigators such as Brinton and Fujiki (1982) and Prutting and Kirchner (1983) have studied the conversational rules that children learn. However, a review of the literature did not reveal any studies specific to language functions, topic behaviors, or other aspects of discourse in any group of non-English-speaking children.

Bates's work (1979) apparently is the only substantial cross- linguistic research available on pragmatics. She studied the development of pragmatics by Italian and American (U. S.) children, 9 to 13 months of age. She provided evidence about the interface between cognitive and social development but did not make specific conclusions regarding differences in the use of language functions and discourse features between the two groups of children.

There are a few reports on the development of pragmatics by Spanish-English bilingual children (Hatch, 1978; Hatch, Shapira, & Gough, 1976; Peck, 1978). In a review of assessment instruments for children's communicative abilities in both their native and second language (Mattes & Omark, 1984), the only pragmatic functions inventory reported was the Bilingual Oral Language Development (BOLD; Mattes & Omark, 1984). However, this inventory was designed specifically for elementary school children. Thus, the need for valid and reliable assessment tools for preschool Spanish-English bilingual and Spanish-speaking monolingual children still exists (Lahey, 1988; Mattes & Omark, 1984; Vaughn-Cooke, 1983).

The few studies of language development by Spanish monolinguals have been limited to morphology and syntax (Belendez-Soltero, 1981; Blake, 1981; Echeverria, 1976; Galvan, 1981; Gonzalez, 1971; Marti- nez-Bernal, 1973). Despite the fact that there are nearly 3.5 million Spanish-speaking schoolchildren in the United States (United States Department of Commerce, 1984), that in the United States the largest ethnic group is Hispanic (Owens, 1988), and that the number of Spanish-speaking preschoolers is increasing each year, there is virtually no information on the development of pragmatics by these children.

It is important for speech-language pathologists, teachers, and others working with Spanish-speaking children to have baseline information on the development of functions and discourse features by this group. Studies dealing with pragmatic development will allow researchers to generate descriptive data that may lead to establishing a framework for understanding the normal development of this component of language by

Selected Pragmatic Features 355

Spanish speakers. Thus, the current study is a description of the use of seven categories of pragmatic language functions and three categories of discourse by Spanish-speaking preschoolers. The goals of this investigation were (1) to determine whether a group of normal Spanish-speaking preschoolers had established basic language functions and topic behaviors, and (2) to determine whether there is a significant difference among three groups of preschoolers in the frequency of occurrence and in the percentage of appropriate usage of each of 10 pragmatic features of language.

METHOD

Subjects

The participants were 18 normal preschool children divided into three age groups: 3:0 to 3:5, 3:6 to 3:11, and 4:0 to 4:5 (years:months). The mean ages in months for the three groups were 37.83, 44.00, and 52.00, respectively. The age range chosen reflects the time at which many children enter the preschool educational system and are likely to have their first speech and language assessment. Additional support for selecting this age group comes from Klecan-Aker and Lopez (1984), who found that 4:0- to 4:5-year-old English-speaking preschoolers still were increasing the number of appropriate uses of pragmatic functions when compared with a 3:6- to 3:11-year group. A final reason for not selecting children under 3 years of age in this initial study is the unavailability of valid tests of receptive and expressive language with normative data for Spanish speakers below that age.

The sample consisted of 9 girls and 9 boys selected from a pool of 30 children. The 18 Hispanic children were of Central American descent, primarily E1 Salvadorian and Costa Rican, and were enrolled in day care centers operated mainly by Central Americans and serving middle-class homes in Tuscaloosa, New Orleans, and Miami. The families had been in the United States between 1 month and 4.5 years (mean -- 25 months). We included only children whose parents both spoke Spanish exclusively in the home. The day care center worker also spoke only Spanish to the children. All subjects used Spanish as the primary mode of communication and understood no more than a few English words. A few children occasionally used one or two English words during the testing, but the subjects all were considered to be essentially monolingual; furthermore, there was no evidence of any significant degree of transference of English


other than that which might naturally have occurred through exposure to English speakers in neighboring communities, on television, and so forth. If, as Ervin-Tripp (1973) has stated, a child is considered dominant in the language in which there is greater facility in naming objects, then all 18 subjects were without question dominant in Spanish.

The children had normal hearing and no history of intellectual deficit, neuromuscular problems, or any other condition that might affect adversely the development of speech or language. The children had no indication of receptive or expressive language problems on the Screening Test of Spanish Grammar (STSG; Toronto, 1973) and the Spanish version of the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language, (TACL; Carrow, 1973).

Development of the Taxonomy

For this study we first attempted to use a published taxonomy. Among the available classification systems, we considered those of Bates et al. (1975), Dore (1975, 1977), Halliday (1975), Klecan-Aker and Lopez (1984), and Prutting and Kirchner (1983). Whereas the study of Klecan-Aker and Lopez included more children than any of the other prior studies (N = 60), and because their taxonomy was designed to assess pragmatic development in essentially the same age range as the present study, we began with their basic framework but did need to adapt the taxonomy for our specific purposes.

Eudy and Strong (1986) and others have compared various utterance-elicitation formats and have shown clearly that a language-sampling procedure elicits pragmatic behaviors more readily than does a structured or semistructured format. Therefore, we analyzed spontaneous language samples rather than using the Klecan-Aker and Lopez (1984) semistructured format to elicit utterances. During a pilot study of language samples elicited spontaneously from English-speaking 4-year-olds, the need for further modifications of the taxonomy became evident. One language function and three discourse features were added to the taxonomy. The informative function was substituted for the greeting function because greeting occurs infrequently. In fact, greeting did not occur at all during the pilot study sampling because it is generally appropriate for it to occur only once, with that occurrence typically happening during the initial interaction before the sampling session. The broad discourse category of turn-taking was deleted in favor of the discourse features of topic introduction, establishment, and maintenance; it was our opinion that the classification of utterances according to three categories provided more


Table I. Pragmatic Features Used in the Current Study Compared with Those Studied by Halliday (1975), Dore (1977), Kleean-Aker and Lopez (1984), Coggins and

Carpenter (1981), and Shulman (1986) m

Klecan-Aker Coggins Current study Halliday Dore and Lopez and Carpenter Shulman

Labeling a a Description a a Informative a a Affirmation/negation a Repetition/revision a Requesting ~ a Personal a a Topic introduction Topic establishment Topic maintenance |

a a a

a

a a

a a a

a

a a a

a

aFunction was considered to be included in the published system, as determined by a comparison with the definitions by the authors of the taxonomies. Shulman's functions were drawn from several other taxonomies.

specific information about topic behaviors than did classifying them only by the turns taken by the conversational partners. Support for this decision came from Roth and Spekman (1984), who suggested analyzing the nature of the conversational turn itself rather than merely its occurrences, and additionally from Bates and Johnston (1979) and Shumway and Byrne (1980), who included the topic establishment and maintenance behaviors in their studies.

Table I is a comparison of the classification systems by Halliday (1975), Dore (1977), Klecan-Aker and Lopez (1984), Coggins and Carpenter (1981), and Shulman (1986) with the system used in the current study. Prutting and Kirchner's system (1983) has been used frequently in recent years and has been the subject of a recent validity study (Duncan & Perozzi, 1987); however, it is not included because it is designed for school-age children. The system used by Bates et al. (1975) is not included either since it is based on children between the ages of 10 and 15 months. As can be seen in Table I, our system includes most of the functions included in the other taxonomies as well as three topic behaviors that are not in any of the other systems.

To assess the reliability of the taxonomy for the current study, the first author and another certified speech-language pathologist (second author) independently classified the pragmatic features of utterances from


two language samples of 4-year-olds not included in the study. This was done prior to taking the 18 language samples on the current subjects. The interscorer agreement was 62% for the Klecan-Aker and Lopez unmodi- fied system, as calculated using a point-by-point of agreement formula (Prutting, Bagshaw, Goldstein, Juskowitz, & Umen, 1978). We determined that the definitions needed clarification for more accurate scoring and to achieve acceptable interexaminer reliability. With the definitions made more explicit, independent scoring of four samples elicited a point-by-point agreement of 96%, which we determined to be acceptable. The following is the modified taxonomy that resulted:

Labeling. The child uses the name of an object, a person, or a location to identify it for the conversational partner.

Description. The child uses language to give information about an object, a person, or an event, typically by using an adjective, an adverb, a possessive pronoun, or a prepositional phrase.

Informative. The child uses language to give information to some- one who he believes does not know the information.

Affirmation~Negation. The child uses language to verify or deny when asked a question or when responding to a statement.

Repetition~Revision. The child repeats or modifies his utterance when asked to do so.

Requesting. The child uses language to solicit an object, an action, or information from the conversational partner.

Personal. The child uses language to express an internal state of himself or others.

Topic Introduction. The child introduces or reintroduces a topic.

Topic Establishment. The child makes his first comment pertinent to a topic that either he or the conversational partner has just introduced or reintroduced.

Topic Maintenance. The child makes additional comment(s) about a topic already established.

For intraexaminer reliability, 40 utterances from 6 of the 18 language samples were selected randomly and classified independently a second time, with at least 2 months between scorings. The intrascorer agreement obtained with the point-by-point percentage of agreement formula was 90%.


Procedure

A bilingual speech-language pathologist whose native language is Spanish (first author) elicited spontaneous language samples individually by using toys such as a playhouse, furniture, a car, and a ball. The session took place in quiet settings familiar to the children, with each child being directed to tell about the different toys in sampling sessions that lasted a minimum of 15 minutes

Scoring of the Samples

Each verbal utterance of the subject and the examiner during the 15-minute language sample was transcribed by the examiner. Lee's (1974) segmentation criteria for spontaneous, nonimitative utterances were followed, except that one-morpheme utterances were allowed because many pragmatic features typically occur in such utterances. As mentioned before, all the children included in this study were considered to be monolinguals. As inspection of the language transcripts showed that sentences in which English words were used occurred rarely (e.g., "Yo veo el choo choo train"). If the English word was a noun substituted for a Spanish word, it was accepted (Toronto, 1973) and the utterance was analyzed; if the English word was not a noun, the sentence in which it occurred was omitted from the language corpus. The data collected for each child were considered to be representative because the average number of utterances per sample was 136, with a range of 93 to 168.

After the transcripts were segmented, children's verbal responses were classified according to the features they exemplified. Three circum- stances could take place in the classification of the utterances by features: (a) An utterance could represent no occurrences of a particular feature; (b) one or more examples of a particular feature could be found in an utterance (e.g., two or more descriptions in the same utterance); and (c) an utterance could exhibit more than one feature (e.g. informative, personal, and topic establishment). All three conditions were accepted.

The 10 features also were classified according to their appropriateness. Appropriate responses were those that exemplified the category required in relation to the stimulus that evoked it, and that "provided factual, acceptable, logical, and believable information" (Klecan-Aker & Lopez, 1984, p. 124). Inappropriate responses were those that did not provide a category when required, or were not factual, acceptable, logical, or believable.


RESULTS

Occurrences of Pragmatic Features

The mean number of occurrences, and the mean and standard deviation for percentage of occurrence, for each of the 10 pragmatic features for the three age groups are presented in Table II. The corresponding percentages were computed by adding appropriate and inappropriate occurrences for the specific feature and dividing by the total number of occurrences for all 10 pragmatic features in the respective age groups. Percentages of occurrence for each of the features were converted to proportions and then standardized into z scores to make the different numbers of utterances in the 18 samples directly comparable. The z scores were ranked prior to computation of a Friedman test with ranks (Gibbons, 1976). Statistical comparison showed a nonsignificant age group by feature interaction (F(2) = 0.20, p > .05), thus showing consistency both within and between groups in the frequency of occurrence of the various pragmatic features in the spontaneous language samples.

Appropriateness of Pragmatic Features

In Table III are the data for the number, mean, and standard deviation for appropriate usage of each of the features for the three groups. The corresponding percentages are the result of dividing the number of appropriate responses by the total number of appropriate plus inappropriate ones. The only feature used appropriately less than 80% of the time by all three groups was repetition/revision; topic establishment was used less than 80% appropriately by the 3:6 and 4:0 groups only. Percentages of appropriate responses were converted to proportions and transformed into z scores. Once more, a two-factor Friedman test of ranks was computed revealing a nonsignificant difference among age groups (F(2) -- 2.60, p > .05). Children across the three groups showed a stable pattern in the appropriate usage of the features.

Thus, we were able to answer both research questions. Specifically, we determined that three groups of normal Spanish-speaking preschoolers (1) had established seven basic language functions and three topic behaviors at a level that allowed communicative competence, and (2) did not exhibit significant between-group differences in frequency of occurrence and percentage of appropriate usage of the features. Although we must caution that the findings should be called preliminary because of the


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small number of children in each of the groups, the data nonetheless were quite stable both within and among groups.

DISCUSSION

The children in the current study were adept at using 10 pragmatic features of language. Specifically, the results of this study indicate that each of three groups of Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 3:0 and 4:5 used the 10 features consistently in free speech samples, and the groups functioned quite similarly in the number of occurrences and in the percentage of appropriate use of the seven functions and three discourse features. A direct comparison of our findings with those of prior studies is not possible because of methodological differences, such as the variations in taxonomies used. However, the results are consistent with prior findings for English-speaking children (e.g., Creaghead, 1984; Dore, 1975; Eudy & Strong, 1986; Halliday, 1975) that the basic functions and interactional uses of language, while not mastered in the adult sense, are nonetheless quite functional by 3 years of age. There was support for the belief we had prior to the study that there was no reason to suspect differences between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking children in the development of language functions and topic behaviors.

The results of the present study are in general agreement with the findings by Klecan-Aker and Lopez (1984) for English-speaking children. There are procedural differences between the two studies, but because the taxonomies used and the ages of the children studied are similar, comparing the results of the current investigation with those of Klecan-Aker and Lopez is instructive. Neither study revealed significant differences between the 3- and 3 1/2-year-old groups; both studies found consistently appropriate use of the functions studied. There is no evidence that Spanish-speaking children, at least at this age, are any different from their English-speaking peers in the development of the pragmatic features common to both taxonomies. The children we studied did exhibit the "communicative competence" that Berko-Gleason (1985) describes as being able to express one's pragmatic intent for a variety of purposes, as well as the ability to interact appropriately with a conversational partner with respect to topic behaviors (Bloom, Rocissano, & Hood, 1976; Irwin, 1982). Additional comparisons of adjacent groups (3 1/2-year-olds and 4-year-olds) by Klecan-Aker and Lopez showed further decline in the number of inappropriate uses of three pragmatic features (description, affirmation/negation, and turntaking). This result does not agree with our

364 Barrenechea and Sehmitt

findings because there were no differences between those age groups. One explanation may be that the "stabilization period," as referred to by Klecan-Aker and Lopez (p. 125), in the appropriate use of selected pragmatic features that they found between 3:0 and 4:0 may last longer for Spanish-speaking children than for their English-speaking counter- parts. Another, and possibly more plausible, explanation may lie in the fact that we analyzed spontaneous language samples, whereas Klecan- Aker and Lopez elicited language in a semistructured format. In addition, because we used a spontaneous language sampling procedure, we elicited a greater number of utterances per child; thus, our data may have fluctuated less because of minor variations from one child to another and thereby may not have shown the differences that Klecan-Aker and Lopez found. Differences also might be attributable to variations in cultural background and social class of subjects, which we were unable to determine for the Klecan-Aker and Lopez (1984) subjects. Finally, the differences may be in part related to subject variability attendant to our testing of a rather small sample of 18 subjects.

With the exception of repetition/revision and topic establishment, the pragmatic features of this study occurred appropriately with 80.1 to 99.6% frequency in all age groups. Statistical comparisons of the appropriate use of the l0 pragmatic features with a Friedman test of ranks (Gibbons, 1976) showed that they were significantly different (F(9) = 79.71, p < .01). Further investigation using Dunn's follow-up procedures (Gibbons, 1976) to compare all possible pairs of pragmatic features employing group mean ranks indicated that the following pairs were significantly different beyond an alpha level of . 05 (the significantly more appropriately used member of each pair appears first):

Description . . . . . . . . . . . Repetition/Revision Personal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Repetition/Revision Description . . . . . . . . . . Topic Establishment Personal . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topic Establishment Labeling . . . . . . . . . . . . Topic Establishment

The current results showed that a small group of Spanish-speaking preschool children did become skilled in the use of repetition/ revision somewhat later than description and personal, and topic establishment later than description, personal, and labeling. However, the issue of such differences certainly is not yet resolved; the question cannot be answered definitively as a result of the data generated by the current study.


Since economy precluded the testing of more than six subjects per group, the pte~ent study represents only a first step in the description of pragmatic development by Spanish-speaking preschoolers; clearly, additional studies are needed. For professionals who assess the language of Spanish-speaking children, these early data may offer some general guidelines regarding the development of pragmatics by these children. There is at least preliminary evidence from a group of 18 children that 10 pragmatic features appear to be well established at age 3, and that they are used appropriately with a high frequency by Spanish-speaking children ages 3:0 to 4:5.

A common observation concerning certain of the published pragmatic taxonomies is that the definitions given may not be specific enough to facilitate high reliability in the coding of spontaneous utterances of children. However, the system employed in the current study was modified not only so that it became easy to learn and use but also so that it proved to hax;e good inter- and intraexaminer reliability. For these reasons, we see this taxonomy as having potential application for those studying normal pragmatic development and those who work with Spanish- or English-speaking children exhibiting language im- pairments.

The most obvious recommendation for future research is that data be collected on the development of the 10 features in additional Spanish- speaking subjects in the same age range as the current subjects. Notwithstanding the stability of the data for each of the three groups, our conclusions must be considered preliminary because of the possibility of sampling error in a study with 18 subjects. Moreover, additional information on the development of the l0 features with younger children would be useful to theoreticians and clinicians alike. Such research would determine the level of variability across age groups and define more specifically the developmental pattern of the pragmatic features studied. To include younger subjects poses the methodological problem of a lack of adequate language tests for 1- or 2-year-old Spanish-speaking children. As mentioned earlier, for the current study we used the youngest children for which there existed a valid test for subject selection purposes. Therefore, researchers studying children younger than 3 years of age would need to use observation and descriptive procedures to establish that subjects have normal semantic and syntactic development, which was a prerequisite for the inclusion of subjects in the current investigation. It also would be valuable to determine whether the same trends would be found for Spanish-speaking preschoolers representing other populations and other regions.


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Documents

Selected pragmatic features in Spanish-speaking preschool children