THE DEVELOPMENT OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR: VI

SITUATIONAL FACTOR IN THE SPEECH OF ONE-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Abstract

1. The purpose of the present study was to make clear quantitatively the situational factor in the speech of one-year-old children. The basic data were transcribed lists of the speech of forty normal Japanese children, recorded by a magnetic taperecorder (10min for each child).
2. Situations adopted were the picture-book situation (PS) and the building-block situation (BS.) And in these situations, each mother was asked to play with her child as in their everyday life.
3. The following measures were used to uncover the sequence of functional stages of speech behavior along their development: total number of utterances (Measure I), the number of spontaneous utterances (Measure II), the number of spontaneous-meaningful utterances (Measure III), and the number of spontaneous-meaningful utterances which accord well with the given momentary situations (Measure IV).
4. The main results were: (1) in terms of Measures I and II, speech behavior was more active in PS than BS throughout one-year-old period, and (2) in terms of Measures III and IV, speech was more active in the latter half of the period, besides the fact found by Measures I and II (These differences were all statistically significant at the 1-5% level).
5. Identification of “word classes” of one-word utterances in the primitive sensory-motor level was attempted, with the finding that “representational” words were dominant in PS, whereas “non-inter-personal” words (e.g. action cues) were prevailing in BS (these differences were also statistically significant).