Reading Report _____________________________________

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Reading Report ___________________________________
__
Susan Grohs Iwamura The verbal games of
pre-school children Neal R. Norrick Saarland
University
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Outline

• Why I chose this book
• Previous reading
• Summary
• Examples
• Evaluation

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Why I chose this book

• I chose this book because I am interested in
  repetition and child-child interaction
• Childrens verbal games often involve repetition,
  as we see in peek-a-boo, tickling games, nursery
  rhymes and so on
• Several of the games and routines described in
  the book involve repetition, and I wanted to see
  what Iwamura said about repetition and look at
  her data

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Previous reading

• According to Cattell, babbling involves
  reduplication
• early words like mum-mum and byebye are
  reduplicative, and the literature on Child
  Directed Speech (CDS) identifies repetition as a
  common feature of caregiver speech, so
• ? repetition seems important to the language
  acquisition process in several ways

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Summary

• Iwamura recorded her own daughter (29) and
  another girl (30) in the car on their way to and
  from pre-school. She found that the girls engaged
  in various recurrent routines and games. She
  distinguishes short routines involving repetition
  and imitation, correction activities, antonym
  games, a you say routine, and a hiding game
• Iwamura stresses the communicative aspect of
  child language, the cooperative behavior of the
  children, their turn-taking and correction, but
  she also notes how childrens routines and games
  aid in their acquisition of language, perhaps
  most obviously in finding antonyms

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Examples

• Example involving repetition and disagreement
• 1 N Say cross. Its red, red, red, red.
• 2 S. No. Green say go.
• 3 N I sawed red.
• 4 S ((chanting)) green says go and red
  says stop.
• 5 N I sawed red said stop, Suzy.
• ? Here we see repetition of single words (red in
  line 1) and whole phrases (green says go in lines
  2 and 4, I sawed red in 3 and 5, and red say stop
  in 4 and 5)
• ? Note double past tense marking in sawed

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Examples

• Example of the antonym game
• 1 N Oh, fall down.
• 2 S ((giggles)) Fall down.
• Ah. Up.
• 3 N Down. Down.
• 4 S Oh. Up. Ah. Up.
• 5 N Down. Down.
• 6 S Oh. Oh. Up. Ah. Up.
• 7 N No. Say, oh, up.
• 8 S Oh, up.
• ? Not just repetition but reversal of meaning
• ? The inclusion of oh and ah make the
  creation of opposed statements more difficult

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Examples

• Example of the you say routine (if there is
  time)
• 1 S You say, you say whats my name.
• 2 N Suzy.
• 3 S No. You say whats my name.
• 4 N Whats your name?
• 5 S Laur-um-Lauren.
• 6 N Say whats my name.
• 7 S Your name is Lani.
• 8 N No, no, whats, say whats your
  name? Whats my name.
• 9 S Whats your name?
• 10 N Nan, um, I mean, um, Laurie.
• 11 S Laurie.
• ? Here the you say game is complicated by the
  presence of the deictic terms your and my but
  they only seem to be a problem in line 8
• ? It is also interesting that both girls are
  pretending to be called Laurie or something
  similar

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Evaluation

• The book offers a different perspective from most
  other studies, due to the focus on interaction
  rather than grammar or phonology
• Interaction is built into this approach from the
  start rather than as an after-thought
• There are lots of examples in the text and lots
  of additional data in the appendices

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Reference

• Iwamura, Susan Grohs. 1980. The verbal games of
  pre-school children. London Croom Helm.