| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學研究所 === 90 === Overlapping speech is a recurrent feature in adults’ conversation. Like adults, children were found to overlap or interrupt others, even though it has been suggested that children do not overlap others at excessively high frequencies. Actually, it is proposed that children’s overlapping speech will increase when they know what others will say (Ervin-Tripp, 1979; Hsu, 1999). Thus, the focus of this study is to find out children’s developmental stages of making overlapping speech and its relation to the underlying ability to make this kind of speech.
The data needed in this study were collected from thirty-two children with an age range from 4 to 12. They were divided into eight age groups: (1) 4;6 to 5;5 (2) 5;6 to 6;5 (3) 6;6 to 7;5 (4) 7;6 to 8;5 (5) 8;6 to 9;5 (6) 9;6 to 10;5 (7) 10;6 to 11;5 (8) 11;6 to 12;5. All the data collected were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Since the purpose of this study concerns whether age factor will affect children’s uses of overlapping types, one-way ANOVA was applied to test their overlapping utterances.
The results of this study indicate that children’s overlapping speech indeed increases with age and that there is also a developmental difference in their making of different types of overlapping.
With respect to Rapport Overlap, its occurrence was proved to be increasing with age. In addition, there is a developmental difference in children’s preference order for communicative purposes of Rapport Overlap. It appears to be much easier for younger children to anticipate questions or possible completion places of a speech. On the other hand, it is more difficult for them to anticipate potential problem of one speaker’s utterance as well as to place the earliest placement of utterance in order to elaborate on the common topic.
As to children’s producing of Power Interruption, its occurrence appears to decrease with age. It is found that, as children get older, they tend to express anticipatory disagreement, correction, and clarification more frequently. It is because their ability to predict potential divergent opinion of a speaker’s utterance becomes mature with age. However, they rarely elaborated on their disagreement, correction, or clarification by supporting logical evidence. The other finding in children’s Power Interruption is the decreasing tendency in the occurrence of Floor-taking. Younger children tend to take over other’s speaking right more frequently than older children.
With respect to the general development in children’s Rapport Overlap and Power Interruption, I find that children after the age of 7;6 start to generate more Rapport Overlap than Power Interruption. In addition, children from this stage are also found to become more competent in making various types of overlapping. Since children at this age have passed into the concrete operational stage, it can be predicted that children’s developmental differences in the productions of overlapping speech are related to the socio-cognitive development.
With the findings of this study, we may have a better understanding about when and why children produce various types of overlapping speech. Meanwhile, it suggests that teachers and parents should consider the emergence of overlapping speech as children’s growing ability to interactionally construct an on-going conversation, rather than a display of aggression.
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