The development of dialogue co-ordination skills in schoolchildren

Abstract

This paper explores certain ways in which dialogue co-ordination skills develop in schoolchildren between 7 and 12 years of age. The analysis is based on a large corpus (from 80 pairs of speakers) of task-oriented dialogues elicited using Garrod and Anderson's (1987) cooperative maze game procedure. As in previous work with adult conversants, our analysis concentrates on how the speakers establish local description “languages” or schemes to describe their locations on the maze. The results indicate that there is strong pressure for speakers of all ages to co-ordinate on common description schemes. However, more detailed analysis of the dialogues suggests that there are two underlying principles of co-ordination operating. While the youngest conversants (7 to 8-year-olds) show evidence of superficial co-ordination processes establishing a limited common dialogue lexicon and particular common description scheme only the older speakers show evidence of deep co-ordination processes aimed at directly establishing the mutual intelligibility of the common scheme.