The proposed research has three specific aims: 1) to examine the generalization of previously reported findings on the development of conversation from middle childhood to early adulthood, 2) to perform additional studies of conversational organization, and 3) to refine a theory of the development of conversation that takes account of the results of generalization studies, studies of conversational organization, and those pertaining to relationships between conversational behavior and real-time processing of conversation as reflected in commentary on and parsing of one's own conversation.
These aims were selected to further knowledge of the broad span development of conversational processes, an important but little-studied domain of social development. The proposed methods of study are observational and correlational. Observational studies of conversation include global levels of analysis such as topic and strategy as well as turn-level analyses such as social acts and focused exchanges. Correlational studies include explorations of relationships between aspects of conversational performance and measures of the real-time processing of conversation as well as more general knowledge of social processes. Measures of processing include Flapan's levels of social inference, segmentation of the stream of talk, and conceptions of the process of talk as revealed in commentary on one's own conversation.
| Sirois, P; Dorval, B (1988) The role of returns to a prior topic in the negotiation of topic change: a developmental investigation. J Psycholinguist Res 17:185-210 |
