Dimitracopoulou, Ioanna.; (1986) The development of conversational behaviour and social understanding in young children. Doctoral thesis , Institute of Education, University of London.

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Abstract

The present thesis investigates language development and social functioning. It concentrates on the development of one aspect of language, namely conversational competence in children between the ages of three and half and seven. A main assumption is that language is an aspect of social life and must be understood accordingly. In the empirical research, nineteen children were observed interacting with - their mothers. The study had two aims. The first was to find out the extent to which children at different developmental ages were able to successfully communicate with their mothers. Here, two aspects of language use were investigated: the relevance of the child's comments to ongoing conversation and the orientation of the child's speech to the listener's perspective. The results indicate that children's language use is not as egocentric as the Piagetian perspective indicates. The second aim was to link the children's use of language with their social functioning. For that purpose, the same children were tested on several socio-cognitive tasks. The analysis showed that children's scores on the socio-cognitive tasks were related to several parameters of their language functioning.

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