A Case Study On The Discourse Features Of A 3-year-old Chinese Child

Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis as a central tool for analysis,this study investigated a 3-year-old child's discourse features with Sociocognitive Approach.It was aimed at exploring the features in the child's conversations with different persons(mother,father,grandmother,grandfather,peers)from two aspects: verbal features and nonverbal features,discussing their relevant causes respectively.To be specific,the child's verbal features include discourse markers,conversational repairs and repetition;her nonverbal features include smiling and silence.As to the child's verbal features,major findings were presented as the following.Firstly,the participant's interacting-response discourse markers were used the most,and following that,emotional discourse markers were used.After exploration,it was found that they resulted from her alignment with addressees and adaptiveness to contexts.From the longitudinal perspective,she tended to use more and more questioning discourse markers and contextual discourse markers,which were caused by her adaptiveness to contexts.Secondly,Other-initiation other-repair was used the most by the child,and other-initiation self-repair following it.Longitudinally she tended to use more and more other-initiation other-repair.It was found that causes were the child's alignment with addressees in sociocognitive contexts.Thirdly,the participant's repetition of comprehension was used the most.However,after analysis on longitudinal changes of repetition of the child,it was found that generally the use of repetition of interaction showed rising trend.It was explored and found they resulted from the child's alignment with addressees in sociocognitive contexts.As to the child's nonverbal features,frequency and presented functions of her “smiling” and “silence” were specific and salient.Firstly,the child used interactive smiling the most,expressing her listenership,confirmation and so forth.Longitudinally speaking,the child was reducing interaction smiling but using more and more distance adjusting smiling.Their causes were the child's participation-orientation and embodiment of alignment and interaction in conversations.Secondly,the child preferred to use judging silence.Longitudinally she used less and less communication-skill silence,but more and more emotional silence at the age.Main causes were the child's embodiment of alignment and interaction in sociocognitive contexts.Finally,the paper made some conclusions about the major findings in the research,limitations of the research and some suggestions in the future research.