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The Acquisition of Referring Expressions: A dialogical approach
Edited by Anne Salazar-Orvig, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan and Annie Rialland
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 28] 2021
► pp. 233–260

Chapter 8
Variations in adult use of referring expressions during storytelling in different interactional settings

ORCID logo | Université de Lille
ORCID logo | Université de Neuchâtel
ORCID logo | Université de Montréal
ORCID logo | Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
ORCID logo | Université Paris 8
During the language acquisition process children experience language in different interactional settings. In terms of child-directed speech, we argue that children are exposed to different models that vary according to different factors. This chapter aims at grasping some aspects of these models, with a focus on referring expressions. Data consists of narratives in three interactional settings: mother-child interactions (Mother-to-Child context), kindergarten sessions (School context), and adults telling a story to an experimenter (Adult-to-Experimenter context). Children were aged from 3 to 7. We compared the participants’ uses of referring expressions in these three contexts and, in the Mother-to-Child context, mothers interacting with a language impaired child or not. Results show that adults’ uses of nouns and clitic pronouns vary according to the interactional setting, and that the uses of mothers and teachers when interacting with children at home or in school do not correspond to those of adults in an experimental setting.
Keywords: child-directed speech, interactional settings, joint storytelling, mothers, nouns, developmental language disorders, teachers, third-person pronouns
Article outline
  • 1.Why study the uses of referring expressions among adults?
  • 2.The diversity of models in child-directed speech
  • 3.Uses of referring expressions by mothers and teachers during joint storytelling
  • 4.Aim of the studies
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Corpora
    • 5.2Situations and materials
    • 5.3Referents and axes of analysis
    • 5.4Statistical processing
  • 6.Variations according to the interactional setting and the status of the adult
    • 6.1Comparison of Mother-to-Child context to Adult-to-Experimenter context
    • 6.2Comparison of Home context to School context
    • 6.3Comparison of mothers of children with and without developmental language disorder
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.28.08has
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Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

da Silva-Genest, Christine, Haydée Marcos, Anne Salazar-Orvig, Stéphanie Caët & Julien Heurdier
2021. Chapter 3. Young children’s uses of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 82 ff. DOI logo
Rezzonico, Stefano, Elise Vinel, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan & Nathalie Salagnac
2021. Chapter 4. Referring in dialogical narratives. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 116 ff. DOI logo
Salazar-Orvig, Anne & Geneviève de Weck
2021. Chapter 11. The acquisition of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], DOI logo
Salazar-Orvig, Anne, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan & Annie Rialland
2021. Chapter 1. A dialogical approach to the acquisition and usage of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], DOI logo
Salazar-Orvig, Anne, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan & Annie Rialland
2021. Chapter 1. A dialogical approach to the acquisition and usage of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Vinel, Elise, Anne Salazar-Orvig, Geneviève de Weck, Salma Nashawati & Somayeh Rahmati
2021. Chapter 10. The impact of speech genres on the use of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 288 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Chapter 11. The acquisition of referring expressions: From formal factors to communicative experience. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 320 ff. DOI logo

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