Warrants in Children?s Argumentative Discourse. Socio-economic and Interlocutor related Differences

MIGDALEK, MAIA JULIETA; ALAM, FLORENCIA; SHIRO, MARTHA; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA

Congreso; Child Language Symposium; 2019

The purpose of this paper is to identify young children?s argumentative skills. We focus specifically on what kind of warrants children use when they link a claim or conclusion with data or the facts that justify the conclusion (Toulmin 1958), in other words, what kind of reasoning underlies their argumentation. According to Toulmin (Toulmin, 1958; Toulmin, Rieke & Janik, 1978) a warrant is the supposedly common ground knowledge (most of the time not expressed explicitly in the interaction) that enables the speaker to justify the conclusion reflected in the claim. Studies on children´s confrontational interactions have shown that they support their arguments by resorting to social norms, norms of property, entitlements or possession, rules of transferred ownership, rules associated with custodianship, rules of third-party verification (Dunn & Munn, 1987; Cobb-Moore, Danby & Farrell, 2008, 2009). Experimental studies have also found that children refer to the rules of the game when they justify their claims (Köymen et al., 2014; Rakoczy, 2008; Wyman, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2009). As the warrants seem to be dependent on socio-cultural factors, the research questions that guide our study are: What type of warrants underlie pre-school children?s argumentative interactions?Are there SES differences in the type of warrants children resort to? In this exploratory phase of our research, we have analyzed 70 argumentative sequences which were audio recorded in spontaneous interaction while the children were playing at home with a peer of similar age or an adult. The sequences were extracted from recordings of 4 four-year-old children (2 girls and 2 boys) from low and mid SES families (Author, Arrúe & Author, 2005-2012), interacting with a peer of similar age. Transcriptions in CHAT format were coded and analyzed using CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). Preliminary analysis showed that children support the link between the claims and data resorting to different types of warrants. Each type differs according to their relation with the situational context: rules of pretend play and non-pretend games, norms of property, within family norms, the rule of justice and other social norms, laws of nature. In the next stage of our research project, we plan to increase the number of participating children to 10 (extracted from the same corpus). Thus, we will analyze a total of 150 argumentative sequences in play situations in which the children interact with adults and other children (approximately, n = 150) in order to determine whether SES and the age of the interlocutor have an effect on the types of warrants children use when they argue. ReferencesCobb-Moore, C., Danby, S., & Farrell, A. N. N. (2008). I told you so': justification used in disputes in young children's interactions in an early childhood classroom. Discourse Studies, 10(5), 595-614.Cobb-Moore, C., Danby, S., & Farrell, A. (2009). Young children as rule makers. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1477-1492.Dunn, J., & Munn, P. (1987). Development of justification in disputes with mother and sibling. Developmental Psychology, 23(6), 791.MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk (third edition). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Köymen, B. , Lieven, E. , Engemann, D. A., Rakoczy, H. , Warneken, F. and Tomasello, M. (2014), Children's Norm Enforcement in Their Interactions With Peers. Child Development, 85(3), 1108-1122. doi:10.1111/cdev.12178Rosemberg, C.R., Arrúe, J.E. & Alam, F. (2005-2012). Home language environments of 4-year old Argentinean children from different socio-cultural groups. CONICET (doi in progress).Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge. England: Cambridge University Press. Toulmin, S.E., Rieke, R. & Janik, A. (1978). An introduction to reasoning. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.Rakoczy, H. (2008). Taking fiction seriously: Young children understand the normative structure of joint pretence games. Developmental Psychology, 44(4), 1195-1201.Wyman, E., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Normativity and context in young children's pretend play. Cognitive Development, 24(2), 146-155.