21 The Development of a Framework for Assessing Developing Conversational Skills Susan Rumble, B.Sc. (Log) (Cape Town) Hearing and Speech Clinic, Tygerberg Hospital Karen Malan, M.A. (Appl. Linguistics) (Reading, U.K.) Department of Logopaedics, University of Cape Town abstract A framework for investigating the development of conversational skills in children, comprising the areas of topic control, repair ofcom- linguistic cohesion, was devised. This was undertaken bya process f . ^ ^ ^ ^ T J S i oraamatic profiles and the developmental literature. The framework was then modified inductively to accommodate features of the data ^iHa^ed&om 12 normally developing English-speaking children in the aye groups three, four and five years. A number of aye-related trends assessment procedures which will aid the collection of normative data presently lacking. OPSOMMING Vi Raamwerk om die ontwikkeling van gesprekvaardighede, bestaande uit instandhouding en gespreksonderwerp, herstel van kom- noZaaT^SS^sspr^dekindcrs, in die ouderdomsgroepe drie, vier en vyfjaar te akkommodeer Verskeie ontwikkehngs- S - oLelstem met bevindinge in die ontwikkelingsliteratuur. Hierdie studie beklemtoon lebehoefte aan meer ver- fynde evaluasieprosedures wat sodoende die versameling van normatiewe data, wat tans ontoereikend is, sal bevorder. The development of pragmatic language skills has been per- haps the most rapidly expanding area of child language re- search over the last decade. Much of the work in this area has focused on either communicative intentions (the functions -that speech acts serve for the speaker) or the skills involved in conversational competence (including presupposition and the social organization of discourse). However, while the acquisi- tion of communicative intentions has been quite extensively researched (Klecan-Aker & Swank, 1988), the available infor- mation on developing conversational skills, particularly in the pre-school population, is as yet fragmented and sparse. The absence of adequate baseline data on conversational deve- lopment in normal communicators has hampered attempts to construct clinically applicable frameworks for assessing the conversational skills of language disordered children. Com- pounding the difficulty are disagreements over definitions of conversation and the scope of conversational analysis, with a consequent lack of coherent models for studying its develop- ment and for developing assessment instruments. Of the com- monly available clinical protocols (eg. Prutting & Kirchner, 1987; Penn, 1985; Roth & Spekman, 1984; Wollner & Geller, 1982), most comprise categories designed to provide a measure of overall communicative ability and hence lack the specificity required for in-depth analysis of conversation. Further, some were developed explicitly for use with older age groups - Penn's (1985J Profile of Communicative Appropriateness for adult populations and Prutting & Kirchner's (1987) Pragmatic Die Suid-Afrikaans Tydskrif vir Kommunikasiawykings, Vol. 37 1990 Protocol for subjects older than 5 years. Wollner & Geller's (1982) Communication Profile and Roth & Spekman's (1984) organizational framework for assessing pragmatic skills, although derived from the developmental literature, are plagued by problems of significant gaps in developmental information and have been criticized for their lack of discrete, well-motivated categories of description (McTear & Conti- Ramsden, 1989). A need exists, therefore, for assessment frameworks that focus specifically on conversational competence and that are sensi: tive to developmental trends in skills in this area in pre-school children. Paired with the need for detailed normative data is the requirement for adequate models of the skills involved in con- versation. McTear (1985) observes that models of conversatio- nal competence should account for increasing sophistication in three basic areas: (i) topic control (involving turn-taking and the structuring of conversational turns), (ii) repair of conver- sational breakdown· and (Hi) the use of linguistic cohesive devices and presuppositions. He argues that in addition to the acquisition of detailed normative data, more attention should be paid to the validity of descriptive analyses and to providing reliable criteria for the recognition of analytic categories. Bearing these requirements in mind, the present study was designed as a preliminary attempt to develop a framework for evaluating conversational skills that would reflect develop- mental trends in the pre-school age group. " SASHA 1990 R ep ro du ce d by S ab in et G at ew ay u nd er li ce nc e gr an te d by th e P ub lis he r (d at ed 2 01 2) 22 Susan Rumble and Karen Malan METHODOLOGY Aims 1. The development of a framework for the assessment of developing conversational skills in the areas of topic con- trol, repair of communication breakdown and linguistic cohesion. 2. Use of the assessment framework to investigate develop- mental trends in conversational skills in normally-deve- loping children aged 3 to 5 years. Procedure Procedures for fulfilling the two aims overlapped, in that the assessment framework was further modified to accommodate specific features of the data obtained from normally develop- ing children, in order to ensure its sensitivity to the develop- mental changes that emerged. Stage 1: A preliminary assessment framework was devised, by combining selected portions of two existing pragmatic pro- files. Penn's (1985) Profile of Communicative Appropriate- ness (PCA), although developed for use with adult clinical populations, includes three sections (response to interlocutor, control of semantic content and cohesion) which fall within the scope of conversational analysis defined here; these were therefore included in the preliminary framework. Since the PCA does not specifically examine repair of conversational breakdown, Section III ofWollner & Geller's (1982) Com- munication Profile, (Communication Breakdown, dealing with repair strategies), was added. Section II (Conversational Acts, dealing with ability to initiate, extend and terminate topics) was also included, with the intention of comparing its usefulness with the corresponding section of the PCA (Control of Semantic Content). Stage 2: Samples of conversation were collected from 12 nor- mally-developing, English-speaking children in three age- groups (see Table 1) attending a creche for Coloured children of Groote Schuur Hospital employees. Both sexes were equally represented. Audiometric and language screening measures were undertaken to ensure normal hearing and language development in all subjects. Table Is Subject characteristics AGE-GROUP NO. OF S's MEAN AGE AGE RANGE 3 years 4 3.6 years 3.4 - 3.9 4 years 4 4.5 years 4.3 - 4.7 5 years 4 5.3 years 5.1 - 5.5 Each subject was audio- and video-taped while conversing individually with the investigator in a familiar room at the creche. Following the suggestion of Brinton et al. (1986) and McTear (1985), a naturalistic setting was used. Tasks used were those which had been established in a prior pilot study (outlined in Rumble, 1988) to be most successful in generating spontaneous conversation: doll play; free conversation on topics initiated by the investigator relevant to the subjects' environment and a story re-tell task, following the suggestion of Griffiths et al. (1986) and Liles (1987) who advocate narra- tive tasks to investigate use of linguistic cohesion devices. Roth & Spekman's (1984) strategies for creating communication breakdown (mumbling intentionally, responding with a non- contingent reply, providing inadequate or ambiguous instruc- tions for performing a task) were utilized, a consistent number of times in each subject interaction, at regular points during f the conversation. Data from each subject was orthographically transcribed from the video tapes, including contextual, non-verbal and prosodic information. Stage 3: The preliminary assessment framework was modified by coding the data obtained from one subject in each age group according to the categories of the preliminary framework. Modifications were necessitated by difficulties related to the use of different scorin'g and coding systems for sections of the framework obtained from different sources. Furthermore, ex- pansion, re-ordering and omission of certain categories was necessary to reflect subtle developmental trends. Information from the developmental literature was consulted for this pur- pose and included in the final framework. Thus, an inductive process was employed whereby descriptive categories evolved out of information reported in the literature and were subsequently modified to accommodate features that emerged from the data. The information was organized into a single framework comprising the superordinate categories of topic control, repair of communication breakdown and lin- guistic cohesion. Stage 4: Data from all 12 subjects was coded and analyzed to the final assessment framework. All utterances were coded for the linguistic cohesion and repair of breakdown sections, whereas only those produced during the free conversation task were coded for the topic control section. For the latter sec- tion, the investigator's utterances were also coded. Coding of data was undertaken independently by two trained speech and language pathologists from observation of the videotapes. Both raters were familiar with the defining criteria for recog- nition of categories. Point to point inter-rater reliability was calculated at 80%, above Silverman's (1977) criterion of 75%. Frequencies of occurrence of each category were calculated for eaeh-subject. These frequency scores were then subjected to one-way Analysis of Variance tests to determine if differences between these frequencies were statistically significant. | RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 1 The categories of conversational skills that emerged in the pro- cess of developing a final assessment framework are shown in Tables 2 , 3 and 4. Discussion of the specific modifications and expansions of categories undertaken in developing and refin- ing the original descriptive categories to accommodate the developmental data is not within the scope of this paper. A des- cription of these processes, together with full definitions and examples of all categories in the final framework is provided in Rumble (1988). The discussion here will focus on the develop- mental data gathered from the normally developing subjects. Tables 2,3 and 4 also provide, for each age group, the mean fre- quencies of occurrence of the categories of conversational skills in each section of the framework. Few o f t h e com- parisons of frequencies across age groups yielded statistically significant results, presumably due, at least in part, to the small sample size which magnifies the-effects of individual variation on overall comparisons. Despite this, a number of developmental trends were evident; these are discussed below for each section of the framework. The South African Journal of Communication Disorders, Vol. 37, 1990 R ep ro du ce d by S ab in et G at ew ay u nd er li ce nc e gr an te d by th e P ub lis he r (d at ed 2 01 2) The Development of a Framework for Assessing Developing Conversational Skills 2 3 TOPIC CONTROL 1 Initiatory Acts (IA): Table 2 shows that 3 and 4 year olds initiated a greater number of topics overall than did the 5 year olds, a trend also reported by Wanska & Bedrosian (1985). However, at least half the IAs produced by all subjects were inappropriate, as they occurred where responses to previous turns were expected. Both Prutting (1979) and McTear (1985) note that children from 2 to 3 years exhibit problems main- taining and extending the topic of conversation, resulting in inappropriate and rapid changes of topic throughout their dis- course. The drop in number of topic initiatory acts after 4 years may thus reflect an increasing ability to use more appro- priate strategies for topic maintenance, with a corresponding decreasing dependency on initiatory acts to serve this func- tion. Table 2: Mean frequency scores per age group for the categories of topic control Category Initiatory Act Investigator Subjects Topic Relevant Response Investigator Subjects: Verbal Acknowledge- ment Verbal Response to Interrogative Nonverbal Acknowledge- ment Nonverbal Response ; to Interrogative Topic Relevant Act Investigator Subjects Off Topic Act Inappropriate Response No Response Age group 3 years 4 years 5 years 5.0 4.5 32.75 0.5 15.25 3.5 19.75 37.5 9.0' 2.5 6.5 6.5 4.5 38.0 1.0 19.0 3.5 8.5 33.5 26.75* 1.0 4.25 6.25 2.5 30.0 0.25 22.25 1.5 6.5 32.75 14.75* 4.0 3.5 * 4 year group produced significantly more than 3 year group (p=0.05) 2. Topic Relevant Responses (TRR): These occur in response to an utterance of the previous speaker. Table 2 shows that for subjects in all three age groups, a far greater proportion (90%) of TRRs were responses to interrogatives, rather than ack- nowledgements of previous turns, a finding supported by Bloom et al. (1976) and McTear (1985). The tendency for adults to rely heavily on interrogatives in dialogue with young children is well documented (Corsaro, 1979) and may serve to facilitate conversational development by providing the child with opportunities to provide linguistically contingent replies, thus keeping the conversational ball in play. Table 2 also shows that subjects' use of verbal TRRs increased from 3 to 5 years, while the frequency of non-verbal TRRs declined, reflecting an expanding linguistic competence and a corresponding diminishing reliance on non-linguistic modes of response to maintain discourse topics. 3. Topic Relevant Acts (TRA): These are spontaneous utter- ances that go beyond the previous turn by adding new infor- mation of relevance to the topic. Table 2 shows a higher occur- rence of TRAs in the 4 and 5 year old groups, with the increase from 3 to 4 years being statistically significant. Many more TRAs were produced by the investigator in all age groups, a trend also noted by Corsaro (1979) who observed that adults generally respond to children's utterances with TRAs, while children tend to respond to adults' TRAs with TRRs. The number of investigator-TRAs diminished with oldel subjects who provided greater numbers of TRAs themselves. 4. Off Topic Acts - either inappropriate responses to ques- tions or failure to respond where a response was expected - showed a general tendency to diminish with age, correspond- ing to the increase in appropriate verbal responses to inter- rogatives. 5. Mean number of utterances per turn: In interactions with all age groups, the investigator produced a greater number of utterances per turn than subjects. The data on topic control generally confirmed McTear's (1985) observation that from 3 to 5 years the major develop- ment is from relatively closed exchanges with an initiate- respond structure to more extended sequences of dialogue. By 5 years of age the children here showed increased ability to maintain and extend a topic of conversation in the form of topic relevant acts and responses. Yet, even at this age, the adult remained the dominant member of the communicative dyad, taking responsibility for topic control in the form of a high number of interrogatives and extensions of the child's utterances (TRAs) to ensure shared meaning, as well as pro- ducing an overall greater quantity of utterances at each turn. REPAIR OF CONVERSATIONAL BREAKDOWN 1. Clarification requests: Some clear patterns emerged here with regard to a sequence of development. As Table 3 shows, requests for clarification were just beginning to emerge in the 3 year old group, supporting both Gallagher (1977) and Gar- vey's (1979) observation that children do not produce con- tingent queries until 3 years of age. Clarification requests were produced incrementally by one 3 year old, two 4 year olds and all five year olds. First to emerge, at 3 years, were specific requests for confirmation, where the child requests confirma- tion of some element of the previous utterance about which he is uncertain, as in the following example. I : 'pass me another chair S: tETs (S holds up chair) I : yes Non-specific requests for repetition emerged at 4 years; like specific requests for confirmation, these do not specify which part of the previous utterance needs to be clarified: I : 'give me another one S: hmm I : 'pass me another chair Die Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif ir Kommuniksieafikinis, Vol. 37. 1990 R ep ro du ce d by S ab in et G at ew ay u nd er li ce nc e gr an te d by th e P ub lis he r (d at ed 2 01 2) 2 4 Table 3: Mean frequency scores per age group for the categories of repair of conversational breakdown Age group Category 3 years 4 years 5 years Clarification Requests Non-specific Request for Repetition 0. 0.25 1.25 Specific Request for Repetition 0. 0. 0.25 Specific Request for Confirmation 0.5 0.5 1.0 Specific Request for Specification 0. 0.75 1.25 Repair Strategies Revision 0. 0.5 0. Addition 4.25** 1.75** 1.5** Cue 0. 0. 0. Whole repetition 2.25 2.5 1.25 Part repetition 0. 1.0 1.25 No response 1.75 1.0 1.25 * * 3 year group produced s 5 year group (p=0.01) ignificantly more than 4 and More demanding linguistically are requests that require iden- tification of specific ambiguous or missing information, as in specific requests for specification and specific requests for repetition. The former emerged at 4 years and is illustrated in the following example. 1 : those 'people who came to your creche that were 'telling you stories S : what people The latter was produced only once, by a 5 year old subject: 1 : put the 'cat in the box s : the (pause 2 seconds) (S looks questioningly at I) * I : cat 2. Repair strategies: As is evident from Table 3, the develop- mental picture with regard to use of repair strategies in res- ponse to requests for clarification was less clear, as subjects showed a fairly high degree of variability and inconsistency in their use of these strategies. Nevertheless, certain strong ten- dencies emerged. 3 year olds produced a significantly greater number of addi- tion repairs (involving addition of information not provided in the original utterance) than 4 or 5 year olds. The relative linguistic immaturity of this age group may account for this : 3 Susan Rumble and Karen Malan year olds frequently produced utterances containing either insufficient information or inappropriate anaphoric and de- monstrative reference (discussed below), necessitating a large number of clarification requests for additional information, as the following example shows. I : 'what was the mommy saying here S : birthday I wlibse birthday s : the girl's birthday Whilst the frequency of addition repairs declined in the older age groups, 4 and 5 year olds most frequently used repetition repairs, involving repetition of the whole or part of a previous utterance. The trend here, shown in Table 3, was for a de- crease in whole repetitions and an increase in part repetitions with increasing age, reflecting a growing ability to distinguish which specific linguistic elements require repeating. Adults may play a facilitative role in this process: the majority of part repetitions in the data were produced in response to specific requests for specification which assist the child in determining which elements need clarification. Revision repair is a more complex linguistic strategy than repetition or addition, involving recoding of the message in the form of alterations to syntactic structure; these were used by only one child, a 4 year old. No examples of cues (involving definition of terms from the original utterance or providing relevant background information for its interpretation) oc- curred, suggesting that these require a level of metalinguistic abstraction that is beyond the 5 year old level. To summarize, the findings suggest that the development of effective strategies for dealing with conversational breakdown depends at least in part on the ability to identify specific infor- mation bearing elements of a message. This ability did not begin to manifest in either clarification requests or repair strategies before 4years of age, although repair strategies were certainly in evidence in younger children of 3 years. Further, it seems the ability to recode surface syntactic or lexical aspects of the message in formulating repairs is a skill developed only from 5 years and beyond. | LINGUISTIC COHESION ; ι 1. Anaphoric Reference: This category comprises pronouns that refer to previously identified referents. They were coded as appropriate when interpretable either with the aid of con- textual cues or due to the referent having been previously iden- tified. Table 4 shows that many more instances of anaphoric reference used by subjects were appropriate than inapprop- riate and that appropriate use increased with age. However, many of the appropriate instances may have been considered inappropriate in the absence of contextual cues to aid the in- vestigator's interpretation. Appropriate use of pronouns is closely linked to the ability to make correct assumptions regarding given versus new infor: mation. Bates & MacWhinney (1979) point out that inapprop- riate use of pronouns (ie. without prior identification of the referent) does not necessarily imply lack'of awareness that pronouns specify given information, but rather that the child makes incorrect assumptions about the 'givenness' of informa- tion. In the data reported here, such incorrect assumptions were found in all age groups. Further, the use of rising intona- The South African Journal of Communication Disorders, Vol. 37,1990 R ep ro du ce d by S ab in et G at ew ay u nd er li ce nc e gr an te d by th e P ub lis he r (d at ed 2 01 2) The Development of a Framework for Assessing Developing Conversational Skills 2 5 Table 4: Mean frequency scores per age group for the categories of linguistic cohesion Category Age group 3 years 4 years 5 years Anaphoric Reference appropriate inappropriate 16.25 5.5 27.5 21.25 28.75 9.25 Demonstrative Reference appropriate inappropriate 22.5 2.0 18.5 2.0 23.25 1.0 Substitution appropriate inappropriate 6.25 11.75 6.5 2.75 8.25 0.25 Ellipsis appropriate inappropriate 15.25* 6.75 23.0* 3.0 27.5* 3.75 Additive conjunction 7.25 15.75 6.0 Causal conjunction 1.0 3.0 1.25 Temporal conjunction 1.0 4.75 6.5 Antithesis conjunction 0.25 0.25 1.75 * 5 year group produced significantly more than 3 year group (p=0.05) tion accompanying information that the child assumed was shared was a feature used consistently by all subjects. This is illustrated in the following example from a 5 year old who incorrectly assumed that the investigator knew who the mem- bers of her household were. I : so 'who lives in your, house then S : v ^ I : who's we S : 0 (S looks puzzled) • 2. Demonstrative Reference: This refers to the use of deictic terms such as 'this', 'that', 'here', 'there', which refer to refe- rents by specifying their location on the dimension of distance. Table 4 indicates that subjects in all age groups had attained the ability to encode these deictic relations linguistically. The vast majority of instances of demonstrative reference were apropriate, with inappropriate use (where the referent was not clear from the context) decreasing slightly at 5 years. These findings are consistent with the observations of both Bloom et al. (1976) and Bates & MacWhinney (1979) that children as young as 3 years show awareness of deictic shift by correct use of demonstrative pronouns. 3. Ellipsis: Use of elliptical utterances allows the speaker to reduce redundancy in a message by encoding only the essen- tial elements; it therefore relies on the ability to identify given information in prior messages which can then be deleted in the elliptical utterance. Table 4 shows that appropriate ellipsis was present from 3 years, its use increasing significantly with age while inappropriate use declined. These trends were closely associated with type of ellipsis. Clausal ellipsis (involving ellision of both noun and verb phrase) results in encoding of minimal information; this oc- curred with greater frequency in all age groups than either nominal or verbal ellipsis. A large amount of inappropriate clausal ellipsis occurred in the data from 3 year olds, who were unaware that further specification was necessary. The use of appropriate nominal and verbal ellipsis increased with age, often prompted by specific requests for specification from the investigator. Their use appears to coincide with the develop- ment of increasing ability to take the listener's needs into account and consequently to select the appropriate elements of a message to encode. 4. Substitution: This category refers to items other than per- sonal pronouns which replace previously identified elements. As is evident from Table 4, the data here suggests that correct use of substitution is possibly a later acquired form of alterna- tive coding then ellipsis. Only two 3 year olds used substitu- tion appropriately whereas all of them used appropriate ellip- sis and far fewer appropriate instances of substitution than ellipsis occurred overall for the whole subject group. All instances of substitution in the data were nominal (one word substituting for a noun phrase), except for one example of verbal substitution (one word substituting for a verb phrase), produced by a 5 year old. Thus verbal and clausal sub- stitution may be more complex forms acquired only after 5 years. 5. Conjunction: Conjunctions serve a cohesive function in discourse when they relate successive utterances to each other across speaking turns. Ervin-Tripp (1978) described a tenta- tive sequence of development of conjunction use across turns: additive (and, too, also) followed by temporal (then), causal (so, because), and then antithesis (but). The frequencies shown in Table 4 for conjunction use replicate this sequence exactly. Additive conjunctions were used more frequently than any other type by all age groups; this is in accordance with McTear's (1985) observation that a 5 year old's 'and' is still the main cohesive conjunction used. An interesting feature of these subjects' conjunction usage which is not reported elsewhere in the literature, however, was the use of 'now' (as well as 'and') to express additive relations and 'so' to express temporal relations, as shown in the following examples. I : That's the shower S : now 'where's the tap (additive) I : now 'what happens next S : so the 'pram ride by itself (temporal) These features are assumed to be a feature of the dialect of English spoken by the subjects,since they were used by all the children in this study. To summarize, the data on cohesion indicated that correct use of all types of cohesive devices investigated was present to some degree from 3 years of age, with a general trend for Die Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif rir Kommunikasieafiviikiniis, Vol. 37. 1990 R ep ro du ce d by S ab in et G at ew ay u nd er li ce nc e gr an te d by th e P ub lis he r (d at ed 2 01 2) 26 Susan Rumble and Karen Malan increasing apropriate use and a decrease in inappropriate use up to 5 years. Developing competence in the use of cohesive devices seemingly involved the ability to scan prior messages, make correct assumptions regarding the need for new as op- posed to given information and to take the listener's perspec- tive into account. CONCLUSION This study has emphasized the need for the development of more refined procedures for assessing conversational skills in children, as well as for the collection of normative data. The procedure employed here, of collating descriptive categories from previous research and modifying these inductively to accommodate features of the data collected from normally developing children, proved useful in ensuring that the resul- tant categories were adequately motivated in terms of their relevance to developing language. Further, the use of small subject samples in successive age levels, while raising pro- blems of generalizability, allowed for detailed descriptive ana- lysis of relatively subtle developmental trends. Given the paucity of present knowledge about the development of con- versation, this approach may be preferably to a more superfi- cial analysis of larger samples. It would certainly be premature at this stage to consider the framework provided here as a clinically applicable tool. McTear (1985) rightly cautions that we are a long way off from being able to produce profiles of conversational development on analogy with similar existing profiles for areas such as syn- tax and phonology. We would suggest that a great deal more groundwork is required in the form of careful refinement of descriptive categories on the basis of developmental informa- tion. Additionally, several problematical theoretical and me- thodological issues require attention if the goal of an effective clinical tool is to be realized. For one thing, findings from natu- ralistic methods of data collection, such as that used in this study, are invariably limited by the fact that conclusions are drawn regarding subjects' linguistic competence on the basis of their performance in a limited and particular sample of interaction. Thus, further research efforts to validate the des- criptive categories derived here should include systematic ex- ploration of the effects on performance of contextual factors such as variations in communicative partner and physical set- ting. It seems likely, for instance, that important differences may exist between adult-child and child-child discourse. Future research will also need to address the issue of how best to 'score' categories of conversational behaviour in clinical assessment; as McTear & Conti-Ramsden(1989) point out, both frequency counts and judgements of appropriacy are pro- blematical as indices of conversational analysis. Finally, it is possible that descriptive categories based on normal develop- ment may not be sensitive to specific problems that arise in language disorder, suggesting the need for testing the assess- ment framework with language impaired children. REFERENCES Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B.A. A functionalist approach to the acquisi- tion of grammar. 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