Speech registers in young children.

EDRS Price MF-$0.25 HC-$2.10 *Child Language, *Intonation, Language Development, Language Universals, Morphology (Languages), Paralinguistics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, *Verbal Communication This study of child language acquisition concerns various structural and paralinguistic features of language and examines their role in the total language acquisition process. The informants were three children (two boys and one girl) aged five years, two months; three years, four months; and one year, nine months. Their speech was recorded over a six-week period which resulted in a total of forty hours of recorded speech. After examining the recorded material, the investigator could identify ten language features, which she calls "speech registers"-(1) Whisper, (2) Softness, (3) Loudness, CO Clarification, (5) Fuzzy Speech, (6) High Pitch, (7) Grammatical Modification, (8) Phonetic Modification, (9) Exaggerated Intonation, and (10) Mimicry. This paper describes in detail the language phenomena recorded, emphasizing important or surprising discoveries. She concludes that exaggerated intonation was the most versatile of all registers as a means of communication for children without adequate vocabulary, and that children learn a number of identifiable registers and begin to use them at almost the same age as they learn to use language itself. (FB) 7 U.S. DEPARTMENT Of HULK EDUCATION & WELFARE OffICE Of EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM 1HE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING 11. POINTS Of VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT Off ICIAL OFFICE Of EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY. SPEECH REGISTERS IN YOUNG CHILDREN' Thelma E. Weeks ur% Committee on Linguistics CI Stanford University mr% This study concerns the acquisition by young children of some Q marked structural features of language as well as some paralinguistic features, used throughout an utterance or a portion of an utterance to offer a contrast to the same utterance in unmarked form. These features will be referred to as speech registers, using the term register as it has been defined by Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964). They state that speech varieties in a language community consist of a variety according to user, that is, varieties in the sense that each speaker uses one variety and uses it all the time, and varieties according to use, that is, in the sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and chooses between them at different times. The variety according to user is a dialect, and the variety according to use is a register. The speech registers described in this paper function to convey additional information or emotion beyond that conveyed by the words alone. This study is also concerned with the social context of speech register acquisition. There has been considerable interest in C4 recent years in the variation in speech development according to r4 certain social aspects (Bernstein, 1962; Byrnes, 1962; and Labov: 1966), and also in the many facets of paralinguistics (Crystal: O O 1969a & b; Hymess 1962; Pittenger: Hockett & Danehy: 1960; '" e. x tn. 'TX 7 -P pa. Weeks 2 Slobin, 1967; and Trager: 1958, 1960). There app ear, however, to be no studies in the literature dealing with first acquisition of these features of language by young children. The study presented here is intended to he a preliminary step toward filling this need. Method Informants. Informants for the present study were three children--two boys aged five years and two months, and three years and four months, and a girl, aged one year and nine months at the conclusion of the study. Data was gathered over a period of two years from the boys, Fred and John, and for one year and seven months from the girl, Leslie. Fred and Leslie are siblings and John is their cousin. All three children are from collegeeducated families. Procedure. Data was gathered by tape recorder at irregular intervals of about two to six weeks. Each session lasted as long as the child remained interested in the activity; this varied from about five minutes to an hour. Notes regarding a session were usually written soon after. In some instances speech was transcribed by hand when recording equipment was not present or was not turned on. Both of the boys were accustomed to the tape recorder before the data collection began and appeared comfortable with the microphone. Their usual reward for a recording session was to be allowed to put on the earphones and play "airplane pilot" while they listened to a playback of the tape just made or to some I, "I" st"'"I*7.9!5:1:1"?.'711,,rr :Ir4-214 ` t""et-21"-^".7,% +.119tsr9r$7,r,!: Weeks 3 other tape. At one year and nine months Leslie seemed unaware of the recording equipment. A total of about 40 hours of speech was recorded with the three children. An attempt was made to vary the setting and the individuals with whom the children talked in order to elicit a full range of their speech varieties. Recording sessions took place in the children's homes, the investigator's home, parks, and other public places. Verbal interchange took place with all members of each child's family, with each other, with the investigator and with friends. The children were also recorded talking to their pets. Organization of the Data. While transcribing early parts of this data, the investigator became increasingly interested in the questions raised by Fishman (1969), Hymes (1962), Ferguson (1964, 1968), Slobin (1967), and others. These investigators asked: What does a child internalize about speaking, beyond rules of grammar and a dictionary? How and when does a child born into a speech community learn the speech varieties of his community? How and when does a child learn the appropriate ways of signalling local role relationships? What effect does cultural background have on the acquisition of speech _varieties? At the end of about 19 months of data-gathering a preliminary attempt was made to organize and analyze the data in terms of these questions using such variables as the relative age of the speaker and listener or the formality of the situation (Weeks, 1969). This preliminary study indicated that for these children, variation with social situation appeared to be largely lexical. The present study Weeks 4 is an attempt to find paralinguistic, phonological or morphological variations which offer an affective or grammatical contrast. An analysis of the data for variations of this kind identified the following ten speech registers: Intensity: 1. Whisper 2. Softness 3. Loudness Enunciation: 4. Clarification 5. Fuzzy speech Baby Talk: 6. High pitch 7. Grammatical modification 8. Phonetic modification 9. Exaggerated intonation 10. Mimicry Most of the utterances recorded during the course of this study were found to be unmarked, that is, to contain none of the speech registers listed above. Therefore, they formed the principal basis for making a judgment about what was marked for a particular child at a particular time. Table 1 offers examples at varying ages of each of the registers listed above, as well as examples of each of the clusters of registers that were found. A plus mark indicates the presence of that particular register in the utterance on that line and a minus indicates its absence. Insert Table 1 about here Weeks 5 Description of Speech Registers, A description of each of the speech registers discussed in this paper follows: Whisper. The whispering which was identified as a speech register with these children seemed comparable in every way to the whispering of adults) and was often maintained over several sentences. Softness. This register) as well as its contrasting register: loudness: has been referred to by a number of linguists. Trager (1958) discusses a number of aspects of paralanguage including intensity and pitch range. An example of one of the functions of softness is given by Trager (1960, p. 28) when he reports that a Taos Indian used "one-degree oversoftness" in mentioning the nonIndian town: "Mexican" Taos. "Nearly every time the town or the 'Mexicans' are mentioned) there is special paralanguage. This we interpret as referring to the great emotional impact of this reference; the Taos dislike the 'Mexicans', accuse them of squattig on what is really Indian land) and talk about them disparagingly) alirosV: as we would hesitate to use a dirty word." Pittenger: Hockett: and Danehy (1960) p. 23) also refer to softness in discussing the speech of an adult psychiatric patient: "The squeeze and second-degree oversoft on I get so may be due to her dislike for making such an acknowledgment." When the children in the present study used the register of softness it was usually necessary to get up to within a foot or two of them in order to hear what they were saying.