Poster #197 - Missing persons: Young children’s talk about members of their social network

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

In early childhood, children’s talk about objects and events removed from the here and now increases with age (Morford & Goldin-Meadow, 1997; Sachs, 1983). This increase comes partly from children themselves and not just from their caregivers. Past studies have also examined infants’ ability to understand references to an absent person (Ganea & Saylor, 2013). However, there are currently no nuanced studies of whether young children spontaneously bring to mind and talk about individuals belonging to their social network who are temporarily absent. The present study examines the development of such references to missing persons in early childhood. It focuses on whether such references increase with age, who initiates them, as well as the particular individuals who are talked about.

The utterances of Naomi, a child whose verbal communication with familiar caregivers was recorded from the time she was 13 months to 65 months, were analyzed. To examine age-related changes in Naomi’s references to absent persons, the corpus was sub-divided into three age periods: Period 1—18-29 months; Period 2—30-42 months; Period 3—43-59 months. All utterances were coded in two steps. First, utterances in which Naomi referenced a proper noun other than herself were extracted, as well as the 5 utterances immediately before and after such utterances in order to facilitate subsequent analysis. The next step involved coding the extracted utterances for references to humans rather than non-humans (e.g., animals, places, or objects). Utterances referring to humans were then coded for Presence/Absence, Person Type, and Utterance Spontaneity (Table 1).

Descriptive analysis (Figure 1) indicated that with age an increasing percentage of the references to a person made by Naomi concerned someone who was absent rather than present (21.4%, 45.3%, 69.6% in Periods 1, 2 and 3 respectively). Likewise, the rate (during a given time interval) with which Naomi referred to absent persons increased with age whereas the rate with which she referred to present persons decreased. A similar pattern of development was detected for the spontaneity with which Naomi referred to absent persons. In all three periods, only a minority of Naomi’s references to a missing person were simple echoes of an interlocutor’s utterance (37%, 23.1%, 6.3% in Periods 1, 2 and 3 respectively). By contrast, the proportion and rate of partially spontaneous references (i.e., appropriate replies to an interlocutor’s comment or query) and completely spontaneous references (i.e. references to a missing person initiated by Naomi herself) increased across the three age periods. A content analysis of the utterances showed that references to absent family members were especially frequent. References to non-family member, i.e., friends, were produced at all ages, and became more frequent in the two later periods. This study demonstrates that early in their linguistic career, young children are able to keep in mind and initiate a conversation about attachment figures as well as other members of their social network. The findings provide an early glimpse of the way that children keep track of the various members of their social network despite their intermittent absence.

Authors

• Qianru Tiffany Yang, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Kathryn Leech, Harvard University Graduate School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Harris, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author