Pragmatics: How language is used

Pragmatics: How language is used

Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities, Vol. 1, pp. 299 - 313, 1981 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. 0270 -4684/81/030299 - ...

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Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities, Vol. 1, pp. 299 - 313, 1981 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.

0270 -4684/81/030299 - 15502.00/0 Copyright © 1981 Pergamon Press Ltd

Pragmatics" How Language is Used Betty Hart University of Kansas

Pragmatics is the study of language in relation to context. The field was formally defined by Morris (1939), who differentiated pragmatics (the study of the relation of signs to interpreters) from syntactics (the study of the relations of signs to one another) and semantics (the study of the relations of signs to the objects to which they are applicable) (see Lyons, 1977, for discussion). Such separation into areas is made for purposes of study, so as to focus on certain aspects of signs and, for the moment, disregard other aspects. Linguistics, for instance, has taken as its area the study of verbal signs (de Saussure, 1916) so as to exclude non-verbal signs such as gestures and facial expression. Recently, linguistics has further limited its area to the study of competence (what people know about language), so that performance (what people do with language) may, for purposes of study, be disregarded (McNeill, 1966). Though the usefulness of the competence-performance distinction has been questioned (Givon, 1979), the goal of most linguistic research remains the explanation of competence. Thus, developmental psycholinguistics tends to focus on communicative competence (knowledge about how language is used; cf. Bates, 1976), and linguistic pragmatics focuses on presupposition and implicature (the shared knowledge which underlies language use; cf. Oh & Dinneen, 1979). Linguistic research has contributed substantially to the creation of language training programs designed to teach children knowledge of words and sentence structures (cf. Schiefelbusch, 1978). So effective have'such programs turned out to be that the pressing problem for language trainers is the generalization of trained language into us~ outs!de training (Guess, Sailor, & Baer, 1974). But in order to arrange for ~ e generalization of language use from the carefully structured contexts of training into "natural" environments, traioers and teachers need to know how language is "naturally" used. In "natural" environments, language use is above all social behavior (Halliday, 1978). Hence, the relevant research is that which deals not so much with the formal properties of language Requestsfor reprintsmaybe addressedto BettyHart, Departmentof HumanDevelopment,University of Kansas, Lawrence,Kansas66045. 299

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as with language as interactional behavior. It is this research which will be reviewed below, first in terms of what it has to say about the nature of language use, and then in terms of its approaches to the study of language use. From the review, certain implications will then be drawn for those working with developmentally disabled populations. T H E NATURE OF L A N G U A G E USE The essential fact about language use is contextual control. Training settings are carefully arranged, and trainer behavior and stimulus materials deliberately restricted, in order to establish the precise stimulus context which will control the trainee's language use. In the "natural" environment, the stimulus context is exceedingly complex, but the control of context operates in exactly the same ways. Individuals may be, in terms of underlying competence, capable of producing an infinite variety of utterances, but in any given context they can actually use only a very limited set of such utterances, if their language is to be appropriate. Appropriate language use must be matched to the context of use in predictable ways. As Halliday (1978) notes, an important aspect of language use is not that we do not know what other people will say, but that we do. When we see a particular context, we can predict with considerable accuracy what will be said there. Much of human interaction follows what Schank and Abelson (1977) have termed "scripts" based on general and specific knowledge concerning the world and frequently experienced events. For instance, when seated in a restaurant, not only do we not need to ask why someone hands us a menu, but we are able to respond appropriately to an utterance such as, "May I take your order?" The setting cues not only the motor behavior, but the nature of the dialogue which will occur there. Even casual conversation is rule-governed. Conversation--the primary interactional context in which language use o c c u r s - - i s organized in turns: one party talks at a time, transitions from one turn to the next are signalled such that little gap or overlap occurs in the talk, and turn-allocation techniques (as, selecting the next speaker by asking a question) are employed (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). What parties may say is not specified in advance, but parties tacitly agree to the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975), such that they obey the maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. The maxim of quantity decrees that speakers are to say as much as is necessary in order to be informative, but no more. The maxim of quality dictates that speakers say only what they believe to be true. The maxim of relation requires that whatever is said be related to what the prior speaker said, and the maxim of manner stipulates that that relationship be made clear. These conversational rules may be violated through use of agreed-on signals. For instance, a speaker can signal a change of topic (violation of the maxim of relation) with, "By the way . . . . " Partial violation of the maxim of quality can be signalled with, "I think . . . . "

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Within turns, there is a predictable format for presenting information. Old information comes first, new information last (Creider, 1979). Old information is the "given" reference to shared knowledge of the world (as, knowledge of the "it" which is "raining") or to information previously presented (as, the referent for "he" in, "And then he said..."). Old information relates to the topic of conversation, and so back to prior utterances (satisfying the maxim of relation); new information gives focus, that which advances the dialogue. When language use is appropriate, not only are the occurrence (in turns) and the topic of tall controlled by the immediate interactional context, but so also is much of the form of what is said. Syntactic variation serves specific, predictable informational purposes (Creider, 1979), cued by immediate context. For instance, the important difference between, "He put the blocks up," and, "He put up the blocks," is that the first structure responds appropriately to the question, "What did he do with the blocks?" and the second is appropriately matched to the utterance context of, "What did he put up?" Special word orders signal selective informational emphasis, for instance, "Understand he may not, but up is where he put the blocks." Predictable contextual control appears in the earliest child utterances. At the one-word stage, Greenfield and Smith (1976) propose, what children encode in lanugage is "new" information, that which cannot be assumed or presupposed from the situation. For instance, in a situation where child and mother can hear a car pull into the driveway, the child is likely to say, "Daddy," since the one aspect of the event which is not shared knowledge is whether or not it is daddy driving the car. The development of productive language is influenced by perceptual salience and communicative need (Schlesinger, 1974): children, like adults, tend to use language to mention what is new and noticeable, or to fill gaps in shared knowledge. What parents seem to differentially reinforce in early child language is its match to context. Brown and Hanlon (1970) observed that parents seemed unaware of their children's "bad" syntax, such that they readily accepted utterances s~ch as, "Why the dog not eat?" Parents seemed to approve or disapprove child utterances solely on the basis of "truth value." Thus, a parent would be likely to say, "No" ("it's a cat"), only if the child had wrongly named the animal that would not eat. By differentially responding chiefly in terms of the "goodness" of the match between the child's language use and the context of use, parents should shape not particular aspects of language use such as grammaticalness, but that which characterizes language use as a class of behavior, appropriateness. What parents actively teach is social interaction, the framework within which language is used. Mothers interpret initially reflex cycles such as sucking in terms of "turns," responsive to their jiggling the baby; through successive interactions, mother and infant adapt to one another and together establish patterns of mutual monitoring and feedback (Kaye, 1977). Mothers follow the baby's gaze and interpret it as an initiation of topic (Bruner, 1978), they prompt the

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baby to take a turn by asking many questions (Snow, 1977), and they encourage the baby to imitate, often by skillfully inserting their own imitative responses between the baby's repetitive actions (Pawlby, 1977). Also, parents deliberately teach turn-taking routines of give-and-take (Bruner, 1975), and gradually develop such play in complexity as the child matures (Ratner & Bruner, 1978). From the beginning, parents insert language where it "fits" at the beginnings and ends of turns; eventually, they coach the child to do the same within such early scripts as "Bye-bye" (Berko-Gleason & Weintraub, 1976). Thus much of what children learn relates to appropriateness, to how behavior is controlled by context. They learn the basic pattern of social interaction, turntaking; they learn how settings cue scripts, and how dialogue cues utterance form. They learn about the consensus developed in their culture concerning contextual control. It is this mutually-created understanding of the meaning of behavior, especially language behavior, which Goody (1978) suggests is the foundation on which human society is built. For a society to function, the behavior of its members must be in large part predictable. One reason predictability may be so important to language use is that the context of use is so variable. A virtually unlimited variety of different aspects of the environment, internal and external, can be attended to, and thus introduced as topics for talk. Further, given that the rules of conversation are obeyed, every time a person speaks, the act of speaking alters the context in subtle ways. New information is introduced, even in the case of a verbatim repeat. When a parent says, for instance, "Come here," for the fourth time, the context of the utterance is likely to have changed from one of summons to one of disobedience, a fact which may be made apparent in the child's speedy arrival, or in the parent's tone of voice or shift to, "Come here (name)." Variation in language use occurs as language is appropriately matched to moment-to-moment variations in the context controlling language use. Codeswitching exemplifies such variation. As young as two, children have been observed to use different language styles when talking to adults versus to other children (Sachs & Devin, 1976), and even when role-playing adults of variou~ occupations such as doctor versus nurse (Andersen, 1978). Also as young as two, children can respond appropriately to directions encoded as questions (as, "Close the door", encoded as, "Can you close the door?") (Shatz, 1978); they seem to have little difficulty understanding the many indirect speech act forms which occur in adult language use. The vast variety of indirect speech acts people produce seems to reflect the multiple aspects of context which sophisticated language use serves to encode. Halliday (1975) notes that by the time his son was 21/2, his utterances had become multi-functional. No longer was an utterance merely informative or regulatory, for instance; each utterance was simultaneously informative, directive, and expressive of personality. Brown and Levinson (1978) describe how in three different cultures language is used to encode differences in status (as professor vs

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student), in power (as employer vs employee), in social distance (as stranger vs family), and in degree of imposition (as loan of a pencil vs loan of a car). For instance, "Close the door," is likely to be used to persons of little power and status relative to the speaker (as children or servants) or to those close in terms of social distance (as family or close friends). But to persons of higher status or power, or to create or recognize social distance, some indirect request-form is likely to be used, such as, "Could I trouble you to close the door?" Brown and Levinson (1978) suggest that these "politeness strategies" may themselves be sophisticated routines, such that when a speaker begins, "Would it be possible for you to spare me a few minutes t o . . . " a hearer is prepared for (can predict) a major imposition, in contrast to a speaker who begins, "Hey, man . . . . " Even the most complex of utterances, then, or the most creative uses of language, may reflect the matching of language use to highly subtle aspects of immediate context. Because appropriate language use is, by definition, contextually controlled, it must vary, if it is to remain appropriate, with each subtle, moment-to-moment variation in the context of use, which changes with each utterance and gesture. Normal development in learning the use of language may thus relate primarily to learning the match between particular uses of language and particular contexts of use, and so transforming variability--what Brown (1973, p. 410) calls the "lawless" optionality which characterizes early child utterances--into predictability.

T H E STUDY OF LANGUAGE USE What we can study--and explain--about language use is constrained by our descriptive categories. We know a great deal about the forms, the topographies, of the language people use, and can explain the use of particular topographies in terms of contingencies of reinforcement (cf. Azrin, Holz, Ulrich, & Goldiamond, 1961; Guess & Baer, 1973; Hart & Risley, 1974); lingustics has provided the necessary descriptive categories (sentence structures, inflectional morphemes, parts of speech). But language use involves more than the display of syntax and semantics. To describe language at the level of discourse, units are needed which enable description and categorization of the ways in which language use interacts with the environment (Skinner, 1957). Much of the pragmatics research so far has been devoted to developing such descriptive categories for "speech acts." The term "speech act" is widely employed in the pragmatics literature because it seems to convey the essential aspect of language at the level of interaction: language use acts, has an effect, on the environment. Demanding, for instance, has a different effect on the environment than does, say, promising. A speech act approach, thus, seeks to describe language at a level beyond the syntax and

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semantics of particular utterances, and classify the kinds of actions which can be performed through using language. Though the more accurate linguistic term is "illocutionary act" (see Lyons, 1977, for discussion), "speech act" will be used below to summarize variously-named classifications. The various classifications of speech acts presented in the literature bear considerable resemblance, since they are descriptive of the same phenomenon. All are attempts to classify language in terms of how it is used to affect the environment. For instance, to name only certain classes, language is used to gain access to reinforcers: such uses are classed as mands (Skinner, 1957), directives (Searle, 1976), requests (Dore, 1977), or instrumental/regulatory (Halliday, 1975). Language is used to comment on the environment: such uses are classed as tacts (Skinner, 1957), respresentatives (Searle, 1976), descriptions (Dore, 1977), or interactional/informative (Halliday, 1975). Also, language is used to comment on a speaker's own mental or physical state or activity: such uses are classed as autoclitics (Skinner, 1957), expressives (Searle, 1976), statements (Dore, 1977), or personal (Halliday, 1975). So far, none of these descriptive classifications has enabled the study of language use to "advance to the stage of explanation... (of) the variables of which (language use) is a function" (Skinner, 1957, p. 10). When the classifications are used in research, utterances tend to be categorized primarily on the basis of form and content: all syntactic imperatives, for instance, are classed as mands. Language behavior is thus judged by its topography, even though the issue is its effect on the environment, its function. The problem for all the descriptive classifications developed so far lies in the definition of function. In all the classifications, the functions of language use have been defined on the basis of societal consensus, in terms of what we all know about how various speech acts affect the environment. All members of society who are using language appropriately know that language works in particular, predictable, ways. If you want something, you ask for it, directly or indirectly; if you want someone to know something, you tell them, directly or indirectly. An essential aspect of learning to use language appropriately is learning that in "a given verbal community, certain responses are characteristically followed by certain consequences" (Skinner, 1957, p. 35). The predictability of the consequences of using particular kinds of language within particular contexts is what gives rise to intentions. We can plan, intend, that our language have certain effects on the environment just because we have learned that there is a predictable relationship between language and its context of use. Thus, intentions are learned functions, and, for research purposes, function can be defined as "the purposes the speaker intends the utterance to serve" (Shatz, 1979, p. 1094). Intentions are of course inferred from observable behavior. For instance, Bates (1976, p. 51) inferred infants' intentions from a combination of context (a possible goal is operating for the infant), current

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behavior (persistent vocalization or movement plus alternating eye-contact from goal to adult), and subsequent behavior (some consummatory response confirming that the goal is indeed the one the infant wanted). But inferring adult intentions has not proven to be so straightforward. Adult intentions, and even those of children older than three (cf. Halliday, 1975), are likely to be multiple. Utterances are likely to be simultaneously informative, expressive, and manipulative, and to encode subtle distinctions concerning status and social distance. Sophisticated language use is designed to simultaneously obtain reinforcers and avoid punishment: getting what you want is often most effectively done by giving, creating a context of obligation or at least of receptiveness (Brown & Levinson, 1978). The multiplicity of the indirect speech acts that speakers produce may exemplify just this complexity of speaker intentions. Certainly hearers seem to devote considerable thought to interpreting the "real" meaning behind what others say. For instance, a speaker says, "It's cold in here." On the basis of form and content, the utterance is a declarative, reporting on the temperature of the surrounding air. But the rules of conversation (the maxim of quantity) prescribe that an utterance can be purely informative only if it contains information which is in some respect new to the hearer. So, given that the hearer is also aware of the current temperature, he is likely to seek out some further, implied, meaning. If the utterance, "It's cold in here," occurs in a context of both parties entering a walk-in refrigerator, the hearer may interpret the utterance as an expressive, a response to the change from one environment to another, and merely acknowledge it, with "Mmmm," or, "Yes, isn't it." If the hearer is the butler, however, and the speaker his employer, the utterance may be interpreted as a directive, such that the hearer brings a sweater or puts another log on the fire. Or the hearer may interpret the utterance as a criticism or a compliment, and begin explaining his energy conservation policies, or describing his newly-installed air conditioning system. Thus intentions, like functions, are not visible within utterances. Not only are intentions often made deliberately ambiguous in order to leave open interactional options for the hearer, but functions are established interactively, as hearers selectively understand and respond in terms of their own intentions (Streeck, 1980). Given the realities of actual language use, it seems unlikely that descriptive classifications based either on speaker intentions or on societal consensus concerning customary consequences will enable the study of language use to advance to explanation of the variables which control language use. The functions of language are not within, either speakers or utterances, but outside, in the effects that language use has. "What counts in the realm of communication is not the acts.., but the consequences they have (Streeck, 1980, p. 145). It is the neglected (particularly by behaviorists) empirical analysis of the consequences of language use for which there is a most urgent need.

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I M P L I C A T I O N S FOR W O R K W I T H THE D E V E L O P M E N T A L L Y DISABLED The points to be made below relate to language use, to language as a social, interactive, behavior. The focus on language use in no way implies that the form and content of language are unimportant, or do not need to be deliberately trained. But there exists a rich and extensive literature relative to training form and content. A comparable technology for training language use has yet to be created. Even so, the discussion which follows can merely mention some considerations likely to be fundamental to the development of such a technology: these relate to the importance of context, generalized imitation, and rate. The context of language use is critical just because it is that which controls language use. Thus, whatever behavior a child is currently using for communication within a particular context must be assumed to be maintained and supported by that context, to be cued by the context and responded to in ways that make it effective as communication. For instance, a child who habitually stands before an adult and waits in silence to be served food is likely to be behaving in terms of a learned "script;" when the adult gives the child food, this both confirms the nature of the "script" the child has learned, and gives function to the child's non-verbal communication. Teaching the child to say, "Please give me food," in a one-to-one training session, and delivering food within such sessions only when the child asks verbally, is likely to give the child a new behavior, but one matched to the context of training. Outside training, the new behavior is unlikely to be used, because the child already has a different, in fact incompatible, behavior which is cued, and made to function, in the extra-training context. So changing how a child uses language in everyday interactions is likely to necessitate not only training the forms and content of a new repertoire, but changing the everyday context as well. Through differentially responding to increases in the appropriateness of children's language use, parents seem to "naturally" shape improved use. But it may be very difficult to train parents or staff to make similar subtle distinctions in how they respond to deviant or delayed language use. Adults who are using language appropriately have learned the complex but predictable match between language use and cultural context, such that they respond instantaneously, almost as though the language and its context were a single perceived unit. Adults seem to have an automatic, appropriatelymatched response which is cued by two-year-old language used in the context (size, setting, motor behavior) of a two-year-old child. But two-year-old language used in the context of a ten-year-old is likely to present a language-context mismatch, such that the adult has no automatic response. Just as an appropriate match seems to cue its appropriate reciprocal response, so a mismatch may well cue an inappropriate, mismatched, response, one unlikely to shape increased appropriateness or a "better" match.

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Changing the everyday context, then, is likely to be a matter of changing the behavior of both the child and the adults who are currently responding to the child's inappropriate ways of communicating. Therefore, the child needs to be trained, first, to respond with appropriate language to the cue which adults automatically present to normal speakers, so as to trigger the automatic, matching, adult response to the child's language. Second, the child needs to be trained to respond appropriately to the most predictable adult prompt. Then the adults in the child's everyday context need to be prompted to present to the child the cues and prompts which they would automatically present were the child a normal speaker. For example, in training a child to ask for things, a therapist may be working on getting the child to ask for food, specifically juice. First, the therapist trains the child to respond to the cue which adults automatically present to another person who seems to want something: delay. Delay (Halle, Marshall, & Spradlin, 1979) describes the cue presented by a hearer who maintains eye-contact and waits attentively for another person to speak. This is probably the most frequent and pervasive cue used to communicate to others that it is their turn to speak. So the therapist first trains the child to recognize this cue; she trains the child to make eye-contact as she waits attentively, pitcher of juice in hand. Then she trains the child to say, "I want juice" (or, "Can (may) I have juice (please)" if the child can imitate an utterance of that length). Second, the therapist trains the child to respond appropriately to the most predictable prompt that hearers are likely to produce when someone who seems to want something does not respond to the cue of delay. When the child looks at the therapist who is holding the pitcher of juice, the therapist prompts, "What do you want?" and trains the child to respond with a label, "juice." The therapist makes sure that the child has two separate responses, discriminated to two different cues, for it sounds "funny" (very subtly mismatched) to normal hearers when a sentence is used in response to, "What do you want?" and when a label is used as a request in response to the cue of delay. Then the context of training is faded into the extra-training context by prompting the adults in that context to ask for the behavior which has been trained (cf. Halle, Marshall, & Spradlin, 1979). The adults are prompted, "Wait a moment before you give him food, give him a chance to ask. Then if he doesn't say anything, go ahead and give him food as you usually do." "But," they are told, "he knows how to say, 'juice'. So whenever you have juice, if he doesn't say what he wants when you wait a moment, ask him, 'What do you want?'" The adults are also given a pitcher identical to the one used in therapy; this not only maximizes the similarity of the cues for asking for juice across contexts, but may help to remind the adults to prompt the child whenever they are holding that pitcher. It is likely to be easy for both adults and child to meet this minimal initial requirement, since it involves a well-trained response from the child, and a cue

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from the adults which they naturally present. The therapist can then very gradually ask the adults to prompt more language from the child, as she trains the child in additional labels and their insertion into the "I w a n t . . . " frame. As the adults in the extra-training context see that the child can respond appropriately, and say, when they focus attention on him, "I want juice" (or some other food), just like everyone else, they are likely to begin thinking that he could do still more. Because the child's behavior is appropriately matched to the context of asking for one or two foods, adults may begin to expect him to label other foods. The adults may generalize, and spontaneously begin waiting for, or prompting, other language behaviors from the child, ones which will promote further generalization from training. To help the child profit from such adult generalization, the most useful skill the therapist can provide him is generalized imitation. Generalized imitation (Baer & Sherman 1964) describes the behavior of individuals for whom similarity ("conformity") is an important stimulus dimension, and constitutes a major mode for learning new behavior. For instance, it seems to be assumed that if individuals are sophisticated enough to go to the theater or drive a car, they are sophisticated enough to be able to "figure out" how to behave in a theater or when buying gas, without any direct teaching. Such individuals can be depended upon to watch what others do in those contexts and match their own behavior to the contextual script in appropriate ways. The use of language is likely to be a particularly important aspect of such matching, and individuals new to the context are likely to be especially attentive to who says what, how, when, and to whom. The contribution to early language development of the general pressure put upon two- and three-year-olds to match to a wide range of social norms of behavior awaits assessment (Hart, 1980), but it seems likely that children learn a.considerable amount of language as simply another component of a familiar routine (Bruner, 1975). Thus, training a child to imitate the whole interactional script of which language is a part of (cf. Guess, Sailor, & Baer, 1978) could facilitate generalization into extra-training contexts. This is particularly likely to be the case if a second child (a sibling or classmate) is brought into the training context to act as the model. This provides the trained child with a model in the extratraining context, not only for continued imitation of trained scripts, but for imitation of elaborations on those scripts. In training a whole interactional script, a therapist is likely to begin by using the routines which are a part of every session. For instance, a therapist might train a script for "leaving:" get up, put things away, get your coat, put it on, get it zipped up, go to the door, open the door, say goodbye. First, the therapist trains the child to imitate her non-verbal behavior in each step of the script. She does not require language from the child yet, but she models it at each step. She says, for instance, "Time to clean up," "Where's the trash? .... Where's the toy box?" As she zips the child's coat, she says, "Zip my coat;" as she pauses before

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opening the door, she says, "Open the door." She hopes the child will imitate her verbalizations as well as her actions, for if he does it may signal the beginnings of generalized imitation. As soon as the child has learned the "leaving" script so well that it is run off as a behavioral chain cued by, "Time to clean up," and reinforced by return to the extra-training environment, the therapist starts training the language components. She presents a delay: she waits, looking attentively at the child before zipping his coat or opening the door. If necessary, she prompts, using the mandmodel technique (Rogers-Warren & Warren, 1980): she mands, "Tell me what you want," and immediately models the language she wants to hear, "Say, 'Zip (my coat).'" Then she fades back to delay, to waiting attentively. Once the child responds to delay, and says, "Zip," without a prompt, this constitutes a language initiation, and incidental teaching (Hart & Risley, 1980) can begin in order to increase the child's general rate of language use. Rate of language use is an important target in training because with increased rate comes increased elaboration (Hart & Risley, 1980). Given that language is appropriately matched to context, the more a person talks the more varied is the language used, not only because a person who talks a lot is likely to be commenting on a variety of objects, events, and relationships within the context, but because the context controlling language use changes in subtle ways with every utterance introduced into that context. (When this is not the case, as when rate of language use is high, but variety is low, as in echolalia, the mismatch is likely to be diagnostic of deviance.) A therapist thus builds rate of language use, appropriately matched to context, in order to produce variety, the generalization of language use to more different objects, events, and relationships within the training, and the extra-training, contexts. In order to build a high rate of language use, the therapist initially responds, and makes sure that the child's language functions, every time the child initiates with language. She may have to prompt initiations at first, either directly (as with the man-model technique, "Tell me what you want") or indirectly, with delay (waiting attentively before giving the child what his non-verbal behavior indicates he wants). Both kinds of prompts can be effective, however, only in a context which contains things the child wants: food, materials, play activities. And the more varied and attractive to the child are the things in the context, the more frequently he is likely to initiate, and the more varied is likely to be the language he uses in initiating. But even after fading back from man-model to delay, the therapist may have to continue to shape true initiation. She may have to rearrange the context in ways likely to make salient to the child the functions of language use. So, for example, she gradually puts distance between herself and the child, and looks away momentarily, so that the context is gradually changed into one in which the child is calling her attention through verbalizing. When the child initiates

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to call the therapist's attention, he is using language in order to produce the cue of delay. The therapist can then use her close attention as both a reinforcer and as a cue for further language use. Once the child is initiating, calling the therapist, she can show him how language, and initiation, "really" work. For instance, in the "leaving" script, when the child is putting on his coat, the therapist turns away to pick up her papers. She busies herself without making eye-contact with the child until she hears the child say something she can interpret as, "Zip." Then she runs to him eagerly, enthusing, "Oh, zip your coat, right, right!" As always, she repeats the child's utterance, confirming her understanding of the topic he has initiated about (what he wants), and praises the rightness of the language. Soon, after the child is reliably calling the inattentive therapist to zip his coat, the therapist can begin "naturally" asking for a first step in increased rate. She can prompt, as she zips his coat, "That was marvelous, say, 'Zip,' again." She can say, "What?" as she turns from her preoccupation with her papers. Finally, she can begin to wait for the child to repeat before attending to him. Concurrently, as soon as the child is regularly initiating, "Zip," the therapist can begin incidental teaching. In incidental teaching, she focuses on the topic the child has chosen (the reinforcer he is interested in at the moment, in this case, zipping), repeats it in order to confirm to him her understanding and the mutuality of the interest, and then asks for more language on that topic. She says, "Zip, that's right. Zip what.*" If the child does not answer, she prompts, "Say, 'Zip (my) coat,'" The first time she presents such a prompt, the therapist does so as she is zipping the child's coat; only after the child has heard the prompt a number of times will the therapist wait, and so require a more elaborated form of language before zipping the child's coat. Before she removes the function from the less-sophisticated form, the therapist is virtually certain that the child can indeed produce the more sophisticated form. As soon as the child is regularly initiating, "Zip my coat," the therapist asks for still further elaboration. She begins asking what color the coat is, who bought it, or why the coat needs to be zipped. As always, she supplies the child the answer for imitation if he does not produce it, and confirms with repetition and praise whatever he does say. The responsiveness of the therapist, her differential attentiveness to, and inexhaustible interest in, any and every topic the child chooses to talk about encourages the child not only to talk more often, but to talk about more different things. Until the rate of using language is high, the therapist responds to every childinitiated topic, whether or not the child's language and/or the child's topic is appropriate. Rather than punishing or ignoring inappropriate or deviant language, the therapist tries to turn such language into appropriate language, by fitting the context to the language. For instance, when in the middle of the "leaving" script, an echolalic child suddenly sings the jingle from a soap commercial, the therapist responds as though the language were appropriate. She creates the context that

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matches that language, and says, perhaps, "Dial soap, yes. That's the commercial where--what were all those people doing?" trying thus to cue the child to take an appropriate conversational turn. If, though, she knows that whatever she may say, the child is going to sing the jingle again, she quickly inserts a turn between the child's turns, saying, "Sing it again." She superimposes on the child's inappropriate language use that context which would make it appropriate. Across subsequent similar occasions, she reinforces the child for pausing between singings of the jingle, waiting for her to take a turn. This is the first step in bringing the child's language use under appropriate contextual control. Training children to use the language they know is, thus, above all a matter of training appropriateness, the essential matching of language use to the context of use. A general tendency to match others' behavior--generalized imitation-can aid a child in learning the contextually-cued scripts in which language use is embedded, and facilitate recognition of cues for language use within other, similar, scripts. Producing high rates of general language use is likely to be conducive to imitation, for when an individual has a habit of talking a lot, not only is the tendency to initiate about a variety of topics increased, but so is the tendency to attend to the language others use, in order to participate in their talk. Crucial, though, is that the immediate context of the talk control the language which is used, in order that appropriate matching is maintained. Thus, the focus on contextual control, which has always been central to effective programs for training language, remains central. Designing programs for training the use of language involves not changing what we already know about language training, but generalizing it to training how language is used. Acknowledgement--This work was supported by a grant (HD 03144) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Bureau of Child Research and the Department of Human Development at the University of Kansas.

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