Children’s response to irony with irony

 

Children as young as 7 years old can produce verbal irony

When a person we are with produces an ironic remark it is quite usual for us to respond to that comment with our own ironic remark. The comment ‘Beautiful weather, isn’t it?’ made in the middle of a summer thunderstorm might elicit the response ‘Yes, I’ve put my sunscreen on so that I don’t get sunburn’. This type of response can be termed ‘mode-adoption’ to reflect the way that a speaker is continuing the conversation’s ironic tone.

We know that irony has a number of different functions in verbal communication. It allows a speaker to be humorous, it can be used to mock or tease or it can soften (or intensify) a hurtful comment. The most common form of irony, ironic criticism, is characterised by the use of a positive statement to convey a negative meaning as in the remark about the weather in the above example. Less usual is an ironic compliment, saying something negative to mean something positive, as in the sentence ‘This tastes so horrible’ from someone who is clearly enjoying a delicious cake. Being able to understand verbal irony and having the ability to produce ironic remarks reflect advanced social reasoning. These are useful social tools – the skilful use of irony can demonstrate a high level of social competence. But at what age do we begin to acquire these skills?

Children begin to understand irony from a young age. At around age 5-6 they will understand that a speaker holds a belief contrary to the literal meaning of what has been said and at around the age of 9-10 they will develop an appreciation of humour in irony. Very little is known, though, about children’s ability to produce ironic remarks themselves. To bridge this gap in knowledge, researchers Whelan and Pexman have conducted experiments to investigate the development of children’s understanding and ability to produce irony, and in particular the development of ‘mode-adoption’, the ability to produce verbal irony in response to others’ ironic remarks.

In the first of two experiments, 65 children aged between 7 and 11 years old were presented with 9 short stories played in random order on a laptop. Each story ended in a negative outcome. After 6 of the stories the experimenter made an ironic criticism ‘What a wonderful way to end the day’ and after 3 of the stories the experimenter made a literal remark ‘What a terrible way to end the day’. After the experimenter comment the child was given the opportunity to voluntarily respond to the experimenter’s remark and if they didn’t respond voluntarily, they were prompted to do so. The experimenter then asked the child some brief comprehension questions. In this experiment the children of all ages were very successful in understanding the speaker’s true belief when ironic criticisms were made. The results also showed that children as young as 7 mode-adopted by responding with an ironic remark. However, mode-adoption increased with age – the 11 year olds were significantly more likely to engage in mode-adoption than the 7 and 9 year old age groups.

The second experiment was designed to determine when children start producing irony in response to ironic compliments. It is generally considered that an understanding of ironic compliments emerges later than an understanding of ironic criticism. In this experiment, 68 (different) children aged 7-11 were similarly shown 9 short stories with the same story topic as for the first experiment except that the story outcomes were positive. At the end of each story the same experimenter used either an ironic or a literal compliment and then followed the same procedure as for Experiment 1. In this experiment the results showed that the older children were able to appreciate the speaker’s belief more accurately than younger children although the difference did not reach significance in the statistical analysis. This experiment also showed that children as young as 7 mode-adopted and responded to ironic compliments with an ironic remark. However, there was no development in mode-adoption with age; mode-adoption occurred among the 11 year olds but not the 9 year olds. 

The researchers’ take-home message from these experiments is that children ‘can, and sometimes do, respond to verbal irony by producing ironic utterances of their own’. Like adults, they share the tendency to mode-adopt in conversation and this starts to develop quite early on. The experimenters admit that their approach may not mirror what happens in everyday conversations and suggest that observation of naturalistic data would provide an ideal follow-up study.

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Whalen, J. and Pexman, P. (2010). How do children respond to verbal irony in face-to-face communication? The development of mode-adoption across middle childhood. Discourse Processes 47: 363-387.

doi: 10.1080/01638530903347635

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Children’s Early Actions in Language Learning

Pointing is one of the first communicative devices that children acquire between 9 and 12 months

How do children’s first words come about? Are children passive receivers of their caregivers’ linguistic input? Many studies have focused on the input of the parent and regard a child’s naming of objects and actions at the age of around 12 months as the natural outcome of the frequently occurring utterances based on highly routinized activities such as eating and washing. Others have looked at pre-verbal interaction such as joint visual attention between parent and child to physical objects as a pre-requisite for learning to name objects. According to this view, the child and parent both look at the same object, the parent then names it and the child subsequently acquires a shared understanding of meaning. But what about children’s actions and their first utterances – what role do these things play in acquiring the shared meanings of words and in the production of first recognisable words?

Researchers Laakso, Helasvuo and Savinainen-Makkonen, all working on a project of Child’s developing language and interaction, have been analysing the pointing actions of young children used alongside their first utterances to see how these things relate to the shift from non-verbal communication to actual speaking. They have also been examining the responses of parents to the child’s pointing and first utterances in order to see how they are sequentially organised.

The team analysed approximately 12 hours of parent-child interactions comprised of 23 videotaped recordings of four children aged around 12 months. They were particularly interested in gazing, proto-words (these are the first articulated word-like structures which do not yet have a referential linguistic meaning) and pointing. They found that all the children used pointing to initiate interaction with their parents and that the children’s gestures were mainly accompanied by proto-words or other sounds. However, although the proto-word remained the same in many cases, the parents did not always interpret them in the same way. The different interpretations seemed to be affected by the context and the accompanying non-verbal activities.

Sometimes the interaction initiated a naming sequence. The child would look and point at something while uttering the proto-word and the parent would then say something along the lines of ‘yes’ (to indicate that the caregiver understands the child) and go on to name the possible thing that the child was pointing at. For example, in one sequence the child utters a proto-word while she looks and points towards a window where there are two butterflies hanging for decoration. The parent says ‘yeah, they are those butterflies there in the window’. These child-initiated naming sequences consisted of two parts – the initiative action by the child and the interpretation supplied by the parent.

On other occasions the child’s actions were interpreted as a request for something by the parent. The researchers offer two examples. The first is a meal time where the child rejects the offer of food from the mother and turns instead and, while uttering the proto-word, points towards the sink. The mother sees this as a request for water and when she gives the child some water, the child is satisfied. In the second example, the child points and leans towards a flower, trying to reach it. The mother treats the action as a naming referent but the child clearly wants to have the flower and so rejects this interpretation by crying. These examples are considered to be interactive three-part sequences with the child’s request, caregiver’s response and the child’s acceptance/rejection.

The researchers emphasise that in contrast to studies that stress the input of the parent in language acquisition their study shows that it is most often the child who initiates the interaction by using proto-words and pointing. The responses of the parent then provide a model of adult production of the words and meanings that the child is trying to express. This is the model for the child’s first words which gradually emerge from the proto-words. Importantly, this work nicely captures the notion that language acquisition is embedded in social interaction.

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Laakso, M., Helasvuo, M-L. and Savinainen-Makkonen, T. (2010). Children’s Early Actions in Learning Language: A Study of Proto-words and Pointing Gestures in Interaction between One-year-old Child and Parent. Sky Journal of Linguistics 23: 199-226. http://www.linguistics.fi/julkaisut/sky2010.shtml

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Prof, I need help! lol

E-mail exchanges can affect educational interactions

Does the title of this article reflect an appropriate way for a student to request help from a professor? E-mails are a common form of student-professor communication but, sharing aspects of written and spoken language as they do, they are also by nature rather informal and arguably allow more personal communication than face-to-face interactions. This informality may not be suitable for all exchanges. Some studies have even suggested that instructors are less willing to help with requests when they are conveyed in overly casual e-mails. A student’s ability to modify his/her e-mail style would therefore seem to carry educational advantages.

Researchers Knupsky and Nagy-Bell have conducted experiments in order to compare the personalization and politeness of e-mails written to peers versus professors. They invited undergraduate females aged 18-22 from introductory psychology classes to construct an e-mail requesting help from either a) a male peer from the same class (16) b) a female peer from the same class (16) c) a male professor (17) or d) a female professor (17), making a total of 66 e-mails examined. The participants were given a scenario in which they were told to ask for help on a topic which was likely to come up in an exam in two days time. The same name was used for the male/female professor (Professor Hillman) and for the male/female peer (Jamie) to reduce the influence of name preference. The relationship between the sender and recipient was described as friendly but not intimate.

The e-mails were then examined by two trained judges for number of words used, number of personal pronouns, number of exclamation marks and number of negative/positive adjuncts used. They were also judged for grammaticality and overall personalization using Likert scales, with scores of 0 indicating not at all grammatical/personal and scores of 6 indicating very grammatical/personal. For grammar, features such as punctuation, capitalization and spelling were considered and for personalization ratings, such things as formality and word choice were considered. The judges also examined the presence/absence of greetings and closings, the formality of the greeting (when it occurred) and also calculated scores for writing complexity.

The results showed that the only significant effect of recipient sex was that the participants were more likely to use greetings when writing to male peers. Overall, though, there was a trend for e-mails to be more personal and more polite when the recipient was female. The effect of status of the recipient was significant; participants were more likely to write more personalized and more polite e-mails to their peers than to their professors. While this might be a surprising result, Knupsky and Nagy-Bell suggest that it may reflect the fact that students know that there is a faculty obligation for professors to help them with their requests. On the other hand, there is no such obligation on the part of their class peers and the e-mails may therefore require broader politeness markers in order to justify the request. It may also be that the students acknowledged time impingements for professors and therefore kept their e-mails more concise. The participants did however use more formal greetings when addressing the professors and significantly greater written complexity, suggesting that they adjusted their language upwards in this context.

A limitation of the study is that it was conducted using experimental techniques with fictitious recipients; knowing the characteristics of the recipient may well have an effect on e-mail style. The authors also acknowledge that the e-mails were limited to requests and the results may therefore not apply to other forms of communication. Nevertheless, it provides a step towards an understanding of how e-mail exchanges can affect educational interactions.

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Knuptsky, A. and Nagy-Bell, N. (2011). Dear Professor: The influence of recipient sex and status on personalization and politeness in E-mail. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 30(1): 103-113.

doi: 10.1177/0261927X10387104

This summary was written by Sue Fox

                      

Using metaphor to talk about emotionally difficult topics

How do we talk about emotional and sometimes painful experiences? Do we address them full on and talk about them in an open and direct way? Or do we avoid talking about them altogether? Many people find such topics difficult to talk about and use linguistic strategies in order to cope with these situations.  One way is by the use of metaphor. Researchers Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volčič have been investigating the ways in which adolescent girls born of war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina use metaphorical language as a way of expressing their painful situations.

Studies have shown that victims of abuse often find it difficult to make sense of what has happened to them and have difficulty in telling their stories. They are often considered to be a ‘muted’ group without the means of expression to help them define their own experience. Erjavec and Volčič show how victims born of war rape use appropriate language to describe their own experiences.

They interviewed nineteen Bosnian female adolescents aged between 14 and 16 years old who were willing to tell their stories. Most lived with their mothers and all were aware of the way they had been conceived. The interviews took place in locations chosen by the girls and lasted between one and two hours. The interviewees were asked a very general open question such as 'Please tell me your life story, and share with me whatever you think is relevant' but this technique did not elicit a coherent story from the participants and so they were then asked four questions at the end of the talk which were directly connected to the study of self-presentation. These were; 1) How would you describe yourself? 2) How do you describe your situation? 3) Who are the most important and influential people in your life? How do you think they perceive you? 4) Which crucial events define your life and in what ways did these events affect you? One of the main findings of the study was that seventeen of the nineteen girls interviewed 'used metaphors as the only possible way to describe their situation' and only two of the girls did not use (only) metaphors to describe themselves, their situation and important people. The girls used the metaphors as a way of avoiding vocabulary directly associated with describing painful situations.

The researchers identified three major themes of metaphors. The first theme, called ‘I am a shooting target’, referred to the use of metaphors by girls who see themselves as being the object of attack. The metaphors were drawn from the semantic field of warfare and included terms such as ‘shooting target’, ‘to attack’, ‘traitor’, cowardly enemies’ and ‘to struggle’ to describe their life experiences. The researchers note the fact that war discourse is still socially dominant in Bosnia Herzegovina even though it is more than 14 years since the war ended.  The second theme which they label ‘I am a cancer’ refers to metaphors drawn from the semantic field of illness. They include terms such as ‘cancer’, ‘cells’, ‘malignant cells’, ‘uncontrolled division of cells’ and ‘blood’ which were used predominantly by four girls who were not publicly known to be children born of war rape. The researchers claim that ‘their descriptions revealed the way in which they internal­ized the knowledge of their situation as a kind of hidden disease’. Finally, they identify a third theme of ‘I am a fighter’ to refer to the use of metaphors by two of the interviewed girls. Drawn also from the semantic field of warfare, the researchers claim that the use of terms such as ‘a fighter’, ‘a struggle for peace’, ‘a peaceful force’, ‘a war’, ‘a hero’ and ‘a pact’ by these girls invokes positive associations and allows them to ‘claim their own status as survivors of war crimes’.

The study provides interesting insights into the linguistic strategies that speakers employ in such situations and importantly, claim the researchers, the study ‘has uncovered severe abuse of adolescents who are already victims of war crimes, and an urgent need for intervention to protect them’. They conclude by urging that coverage of the topic of adolescents born of war rape in local media and in political, educational and academic discussions should not be social taboo, ‘which only contributes to the public stigmatization of adolescents who are already the victims of abuse, injustice, discrimina­tion and ethnic hatred’.

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Erjavec, K. and Volčič, Z. (2010). ‘Target’, ‘cancer’ and ‘warrior’: Exploring painful

metaphors of self-presentation used by girls born of war rape.  Discourse and Society 21(5), 524-543. doi: 10.1177/0957926510373981

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Does early oral vocabulary predict literacy competence?

 

Oral vocabulary has been found to play a direct role in reading and to predict later reading comprehension competence

Studies have shown that children who are less skilled in oral language at age 3 years and older have been found to be at a disadvantage in acquiring speaking, listening, and reading skills during formal schooling. In fact, many studies have shown that oral language and reading abilities are closely related.  Joanne Lee  takes this a step further and investigates the relationship between oral language ability at the earlier age of 2 and literacy development up to age 11 using a large longitudinal data set of typically developing children from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD).

The study, carried out in the USA, calculated the vocabulary size of 1,071 children (549 boys, 522 girls) aged 2, based on a checklist used to assess the receptive and productive vocabularies of children between ages 16 and 30 months and also between 30 and 37 months. The primary purpose of the study was to test whether early words measured at age 2 would significantly and uniquely predict subsequent language and reading skills of typically developing children. Three measures of early vocabulary were used to test which was the better predictor for later language and literacy development, (1) total vocabulary size (2) total number of verbs and (3) the proportion of verbs as function of total words.  The children were put into large or small vocabulary groups if they fell in the top or bottom one-third of the list respectively. This was done for each predictor so that there were two distinct categories of children (those with large vocabularies and those with small vocabularies) for each predictor. The scores were then compared to sixteen language and literacy measures taken for the children at various stages between the ages of 3 and 11. These consisted of such things as verbal comprehension, expressive language, picture vocabulary and different aspects of literacy such as decoding skills, word recognition and reading comprehension.

After controlling for individual differences in terms of socio-economic group, gender, birth order (whether the child was first-born, second-born etc. in a family) and ethnicity, the findings of this study show that early expressive vocabulary can significantly predict language and literacy outcomes such as letter identification, phonological awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension over the span of 9 years. The best predictor was the total vocabulary size followed by the total number of verbs which was also a good predictor. The proportion of verbs as a function of total words did not turn out to be a good predictor. Thus, children with a larger vocabulary size (or even total verb size) at age 2 continued to be on an advanced language and literacy development trajectory than their peers with a smaller vocabulary size.

One limitation of this study, acknowledged by the researcher, is that although early expressive vocabulary appears to predict subsequent language and literacy competence, the analysis does not explore the causal relationship between the two. Furthermore, measures of lexical composition other than the number of verbs produced, such as mean length of utterance or grammatical markers, could also be used to see whether these are better predictors of subsequent language and literacy than total vocabulary size.

However, despite these limitations, the results indicate that there is a continuum between early oral development and literacy development and the work underscores the importance of starting work on literacy development with children as young as two years old. The researcher concludes by urging parents, caregivers and early educators to provide a language-rich environment for children in the earliest years in order to lay a solid foundation for their language and literacy outcome later in life.

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Lee. J. (2011). Size matters: Early vocabulary as a predictor of language and literacy competence. Applied Psycholinguistics 32: 69–92. doi:10.1017/S0142716410000299

This summary was written by Sue Fox

(Re)telling Stories

 

Have you ever been in a position where a person has told you a story about something that has happened to them and then you hear that same person telling the same story to someone else? You might have thought to yourself, “Hmm…that’s not the way I heard it”. That’s because it seems that our stories change according to who we are telling and what we are trying to achieve in that particular interaction.

We all tell stories in our everyday conversations. Typically, the teller of a story gives a report of an event in its chronological order to one or more recipients. In doing so, the teller performs some kind of social action be it boasting, providing an explanation, complaining or apologising among other things. It is also well known that we modify our stories according to our audience and this is manifested in such ways as topic selection, word choice, how we open and close sequences and in the ordering of sequences themselves. When we are telling a story to several people at once we also modify the telling of the story to take into account the recipients’ knowledge of the reported event. But what resources does a teller draw on when telling the same story at different times and to different recipients who have varying degrees of knowledge and perhaps opposing perspectives on the reported event?

This is what Maarit Niemelä and Mirka Rauniomaa have been investigating. In examining how one person tells the same story over a series of telephone calls to three different recipients they examine some of the features that change according to who the recipient of the story is. They also analyse what ‘stance’ the interlocutors take, in other words how the interlocutors portray themselves and others in a certain light in view of the subject matter at hand.

The case they analyse involves a young man who makes three phone calls on the same day to three different people. He tells each recipient about the trouble he’s been having with his computer monitor. The receiver of the call is already aware or is explicitly made aware during the call that the monitor had broken down and had been taken to the warranty service some time ago. Having got the monitor back from the warranty service, the young man had reconnected it and used it for a short time but it had broken down again.

The researchers show that in each (re)telling some essential parts of the story remain constant, for example the order in which things happened and the highlight of the story which is that the monitor has broken down for a second time. However, other things that are less constant such as the evaluations and the degree of detail in the telling are shaped by the teller’s stance, the reason for the call and the relationship between the teller and the recipient. In all three cases the story might be categorised as a ‘troubles-telling’ story but in the first call to a law student friend the storyteller not only vents his frustration by using the expression ‘now I’m pissed off’ but also uses the call as a request for legal advice with the use of ‘you being a lawyer and all’ and ‘can you give me any advice’. The second call is to a flat-mate and again the teller displays his irritation with the use this time of ‘I’m so shattered’ but this call is considered to be for the purpose of providing information to someone who may be affected by the events by his use of ‘I just realized that I didn’t call you yet’. The third call is to someone that the storyteller seems to be more familiar with and who seems to be a fellow computer game-player. Again, the venting of feelings is explicit as in ‘bloody hell my computer monitor broke down again’ and ‘I’m calling like really angry’ but this time the call seems to be for the purpose of soliciting sympathy as shown in expressions such as ‘I need comforting right now’ and ‘this is so unfair’.

By examining how stories get retold on multiple occasions the researchers have shown that a teller modifies the story in order to accomplish certain social actions and that individual features of the (re)tellings are designed with the recipient in mind and will depend on such things as the type of relationship between the teller and recipient and the shared knowledge they have about the events. So remember that when someone tells you a story it is rarely just a simple reporting of events!

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 Niemelä, M. and Rauniomaa, M. (2010). Mobilizing

 (Re)tellings of a Story to Accomplish Multiple Social Actions.                                    

  SKY Journal of Linguistics 23:227-264.

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Do euphemisms soften the impact of war or mask the truth?

 

Casualty                                                                                                                        

‘He had been trained to take out other men.

We had made sure his weaponry was smart,

And softened up the enemy with carpet

Bombing. Sadly, he was taken out

By some friendly fire.’

Instead he could have taken out some girls,

The mirror having proved him smart enough;

And one, perhaps, happy to take him home,

Might have softened up on some dark carpet

By some friendly fire.

In his short poem ‘Casualty’, Gerry Abbott responds to the use of euphemisms for killing often seen and heard in the media. Terms such as ‘taken out’ and ‘friendly fire’ have become commonplace in British newspapers and news broadcasts but he questions the role that these euphemisms play in the reporting of war stories.

He looks first at the use of euphemisms in daily life as a way of avoiding delicate or taboo subject matter and refers to these as ‘respectful’ euphemisms. Included here are terms such as ‘passed away’ or ‘gone to meet their Maker’ to refer to dying, the dead become ‘deceased’ and often the dead are not ‘buried’ but ‘laid to rest’, with the grave becoming their ‘last home’. These, he says, are used as acts of social kindness and show concern for the feelings of our fellow human beings.

He then turns his attention to the increased use in recent years of military euphemisms used in war reporting.  He points to subtle differences in terms such as ‘friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage’. Both terms are used to refer to the accidental (or ‘careless’ as Abbott puts it) act of killing people but the former refers to combatants killed by their own side while the latter refers to civilians caught up in the crossfire. He is especially scathing of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ which has pleasant connotations of healing and hygiene when, in fact, it is used to refer to the deliberate mass slaughter of civilians. These, he argues, are not respectful in purpose but are ‘deliberate attempts to obfuscate military actions, to hide their mistakes and to excuse the perpetrators’.

Of course, as Abbott acknowledges, euphemisms thrive in spheres other than military contexts. He points to terms such as ‘creative accounting’ and ‘massaging’ to mean the falsifying of financial records and the use of ‘climate change’ when meteorologists mean climate damage. In Parliament, where members are not permitted to accuse each other of lying, phrases such as ‘economical with the truth’ and ‘created a false impression’ have sprung up.

The main thrust of this paper, then, is that the use of euphemisms in these contexts points to a lack of truthfulness. Abbott proposes that acronyms such as WMD (‘weapons of mass destruction’) to refer to powerful missiles and bombs should be uttered/written in full and replaced with ‘weapons of mass death’.

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 Abbott, G. (2010). Dying and killing: euphemisms in current English. 

 English Today 104 Vol. 26 (4): 51-52. doi:10.1017//S0266078410000349

 

This summary was written by Sue Fox

   

Will Chinese become the world’s most important language?

 

Will we all be speaking Chinese in the future?

David Graddol considers this question in relation to China’s rise to becoming the world’s second largest economy and the expectation that it will become the world’s largest manufacturer within the next year. Will its economic rise mean that its language will reach equally global proportions? The rise in the number of users of a language is of course linked to economic and political developments. The rise of English can be seen within the historical context of the spread of the British Empire and, in more recent years, the global importance of the US economy as well as the impact of Microsoft in computer technology. 

However, as Graddol points out, the language situation is somewhat different in China than in English speaking countries. All Chinese speakers share the same written code but, unlike English, the different varieties of Chinese are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Standard Mandarin, or Putonghua as it is known as in China, is only spoken by just over half the population. In Hong Kong and Macau the standard spoken language is Cantonese.  It is this tension between the different groups of speakers which may determine the role that Mandarin and English play in the future of China and, indeed, around the world. As Cantonese speakers strive to maintain their variety against the surge of Mandarin they may opt to use English as a lingua franca as a way of protecting the future of Cantonese. Of course, much will depend on whether people’s attitudes change and whether economic factors come into play if Mandarin becomes the language of power in Cantonese speaking regions.

Graddol reminds us that Chinese is not the only language to be considered as a competitor to English and that in some regions across the globe Spanish is increasingly the partner language to English. He does not reach a conclusion on the future of English but suggests that ‘different regional patterns of English-knowing bilingualism’ is the likely outcome with ‘no single language taking over the role of English as a global lingua franca’.

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                     Graddol, D. (2010). Will Chinese take over from English
                      as the world’s most important language? 
                      English Today 104 Vol. 26 (4): 3-4.

                      doi:10.1017//S0266078410000386

This summary was written by Sue Fox