Factors reflecting children?s use of temporal terms when talking about the future as a function of social group.

ROSEMBERG, C. R.; ALAM, F.; STEIN, A.

Workshop; Workshop en LSCP, CNRS, Francia; 2017

The aim of the study is to explore the relationship between the temporal terms used by 4-year-old children from different SES to textualize future sequences of events in family interactions & the linguistic and discursive dimensions that characterize their environments of upbringing. The analysis of SES differences in children?s environment considered: 1. the quantity of terms that children heard and 2. certain qualitative social, interactional and discursive dimensions.There are no previous research in Spanish speaking populations nor with diverse socioeconomic groups, that characterize the relationship between the temporal terms used by the children and the input they received. At age 4, Spanish-speaking children can make use of diverse types of temporal and sequential terms in the production of accounts referring to foreseen events; as was shown regarding other types of narratives (Sebastián & Slobin, 1994; Slobin & Bocaz, 1988; Uccelli, 2009).Results showed that there are significant SES differences in the quantity of tokens and types of these terms used while narrating; differences that have also been registered in other populations & languages (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2006). The results provide new empirical evidence of the relationship between lexical learning and the frequency with which terms appear in the input (Bloom et al., 2012; Hoff 2006; Huttenlocher et al., 1991; Lieven, 2010; Tomasello, 2003; Weizman & Snow, 2001). The discursive context, the temporality of the referred/denoted event, the participation of the young child in the interactional situation, and the interactional function of the utterance that contained the temporal term are significantly associated with SES. These factors characterize the interactional and discursive patterns that shape the situation in which these temporal terms were used in each SES group.