Overheard Speech as a Source of Informal Learning in Two American Communities

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

In the last twenty years, considerable attention has focused on the number of words spoken to poor versus affluent children as a potential source of differences in their school achievement. The Word Gap described by Hart and Risley (1995) was predicated on the number of words spoken by a single caregiver to the child in joint-attention episodes where a single caregiver interacts with an infant in a face-to-face posture. However, cross-cultural evidence has suggested that this model of language teaching is anomalous on the world stage demonstrating that many children learn language predominantly from overhearing the speech of other persons around them (Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, 2012; Lancy, 2015).
Recent studies have suggested that even in cultures where joint-attention episodes are not the norm for caregiver-child interaction, speech heard in joint-attention episodes predicts vocabulary acquisition better than does overheard speech (e.g., Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012). However, these studies treat all overheard speech as alike (Brown & Gaskins, 2014). It is reasonable to question if the language-learning child might attend to some types of overheard speech more than others, and to speech heard in some contexts more than that heard in other contexts. This question is not trivial, for some children in American communities hear widely varying proportions of their total language input in overheard contexts as opposed to joint-attention contexts (Sperry, Sperry, & Miller, 2018).
To date, little is known about overheard speech in young children’s ambient environments in terms of either (a) the social configurations in which it occurs, or (b) the nature of its content. To address this gap, we have analyzed the verbatim transcripts from 67.5 hours of observations from a rural, Indiana European American (IN) working-class community and from 35 hours of observations from a rural, Alabama African American (AL) poor community. In prior work, we determined that young children listen to overheard speech, but at substantially different rates across these communities (69% in AL versus 35% in IN). In the present study, we analyze this discrepancy along the lines of a model proposed by Rogoff et al. (2016) that stresses the role of context in informal learning settings. We examine overheard speech to consider how it is organized within the child’s community, paying particular attention to aspects of these conversations that might motivate the child to listen.
Results suggest that these young children are highly motivated to listen to speech that is between (a) parents and about them, (b) between siblings or other age-mates, and (c) between siblings and parents. Although the influence of these scenarios varies somewhat across communities, the overall difference in amount of speech these children listen to is more a product of the amount of total overheard speech within versus without these categories. In IN, more overheard speech fell without these categories resulting in a greater amount of inattention on the part of the children.
In sum, these results affirm the importance of discriminating the nature of overheard speech in particular contexts to assess its impact on later vocabulary development.

Authors

• Douglas E. Sperry, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
  Presenting Author

• Linda L Sperry, Indiana State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mariah C. Stout, Indiana State University
  Non-Presenting Author