Shoshana Blum-Kulka & Catherine E. Snow (eds.), Talking to adults: The contribution of multiparty discourse to language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 355.

Extract

This volume of 12 individual essays is an important step forward in the literature on child language development. As the title hints, the book follows Talking to children (Snow & Ferguson 1977). Both volumes focus on input and language acquisition. Talking to children demonstrated the importance of phenomenon of baby talk and dealt with the nature of speech addressed to young children and different parental conversational styles. The title Talking to adults gives an impression that this time, more attention will be paid to speech used by children to adults, but that is not what it seems to be. Rather, the contributors here focus on how children participate in discourse with participating structures more complex than dyads – that is, when the audience is “larger” than just the child's own mother, and when simplified registers are not necessarily used. The pioneering Talking to children, in contrast, was concerned mainly with dyadic interaction with a primary caretaker. The papers in Talking to adults aim to show that child's participation in such multiparty talk seems to contribute greatly to the pragmatic development of children. The 12 chapters give an overview of empirical research concerning the acquisition of various discursive skills: explanations and narratives, control talk, affect, humor, telling a joke, telling lies, and bilingualism.