A Comparative Study Of English And Mandarin-speaking Children's Turn-taking Pragmatic Strategies

Turn-taking competence is an important aspect for children in their conversational competence. Before able to use language, children have been able to take turns with adults through non-speech behaviors. As the development of communicative abilities, they gradually learn to use proper utterances to express their communicative intention, and can adopt proper strategies when communicating with others in different situations. At pre-school stage, children have almost mastered turn-taking pragmatic strategies that adults use in conversations. This thesis will analyze pre-school children's use of turn-taking pragmatic strategies in their conversations under the guide of turn-taking rules.With the employment of survey research method, statistical method and longitudinal method, the present study examines the overall situation of pre-school children's use of turn-taking pragmatic strategies(English and Mandarin children both are two respectively). Two Mandarin-speaking children are MHR(01; 09; 05-06;05; 23) and ZHZ(01; 09; 06-06; 05; 23), from which we select 50 observation points,analyzing the four types of children's turn-taking pragmatic strategies, they are turn-claiming strategy, turn-holding strategy, turn-yielding strategy and repairing strategies for overlap and silence from the aspects of tokens, frequencies and tendencies. And two English-speaking children are from the Brown Corpus, ADA(02;03; 18- 05; 02; 12) and SAR(02; 03; 19- 05; 01; 06), from which we select 36 observation points; then the author makes a comparative study of Mandarin and English-speaking children's use of turn-taking pragmatic strategies to find the similarities and differences and to analyze the reasons.The major results are as follows:(1) Children have been able to use turn-taking strategies to claim turns, hold turns, yield turns and repair overlap and silence in conversations at their pre-school age;(2) In four types of turn-taking pragmatic strategies, the frequency of turn-yielding strategy is the highest and is very far from the second, turn-claiming strategy. The frequencies of turn-holding strategy and repairing strategy for overlap and silence are much less than the first two turn-takingpragmatic strategies;(3) The total number of turn-taking pragmatic strategies of two male subjects is much more than two female subjects;(4) At the same age span, the total number of turn-taking pragmatic strategies of Chinese-speaking children is much more than English-speaking children;(5) The total number of turn-claiming strategy and turn-yielding strategy of Mandarin-speaking children is much more than English-speaking children, while the total number of Chinese-speaking children's turn-holding strategy and repairing strategies for overlap and silence is much less than English-speaking children's.Children's turn-taking pragmatic strategies are related to the age of children, the external language environment and children's individual cognitive competence.